[Techtalk] Partitioning hard drives

[Rudy Zijlstra]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, Conor Daly wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 03:15:59PM -0400 or so it is rumoured hereabouts,
> Indefatigable42 thought:
>> Rudy, I think that's what I'm looking for, to do a backup from one OS of
>> selected folders on both partitions. Thanks!
>>
>> The drive that I'm backing things up to would itself have to be partitioned,
>> right? Or would it not matter?
>
> In my case it doesn't matter.  However, I have to partition the drives
> that I restore to if I have to restore from the backup.
>
> I don't know if you would have to have an NTFS partition to backup the XP
> drives to.  This will fail to use the 'cp -l'
> make-link-to-preserve-versions method though.
>

rdiff-backup does not make use of "cp", it is based on rsync library. It 
stores metadata of the files for backup in the backup location, so it can 
restore the file properties.

For rdiff-backup you specify the backup destination. If you have different 
sources, you can give different destination directories on the same 
physical disk (without partitioning).

It can also backup over ethernet, talking to rdiff-backup in daemon mode 
on a backup machine, etc....

one thing to keep in mind, is that if you do not partition, you need to 
choose a filesystem that both OS can read/write. So this might force a 
partitioning of the drive.

Also, rdiff-backup will after the initial backup make incrementals, and 
each incremental can be recovered. And you can specify for how many 
days/weeks/months you want to keep increments (how long do you want to be 
able to look back in time)

Rudy