[Techtalk] Using weekly backup disk to store partial full backup as well?

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2007 at 10:35:52PM +0200, R. Daneel Olivaw wrote:
> I'd suggest something really different:
> one external usb drive (this may seem expensive, but compared to the
> advantages, it may turn out much cheaper), mounted as ext3
> filesystem. After that, use the *amazing* opensource "rsnapshot" tool.

Funny, I just started doing this myself this week!
I figured I'd never get proper backups unless the process was fully
automated, which meant that burning to DVDs was out, since that requires
manual intervention.

Though my USB drive is reiserfs rather than ext3 -- why did you choose
ext3?  Because it's more often enabled in a kernel?

> - restoring is as easy as accessing the original data on your computer
That's one of the big plusses for me.

> The only drawback is that it cannot compress data (but this may be
> achieved whith compressing filesystems, a thing I never tried out).
That's an interesting thought.

> Besides, if yuo have too many files changing all the time, you may run
> out of disk space, but with nowadays disk sizes, this should not be a
> big trouble.
I ended up getting a USB drive that was much bigger than the space on my
desktop (since I got the desktop in 2005, when the average disk size was
40G rather than 80G) so I'm not worrying too much about the space the
backups are taking.  Not yet, anyway.

Kathryn Andersen
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