Good move, but you'll get faster backups and less SSD wear, if you're backing up to SD cards or SSDs, if you do it with either rsync or rsnapshot.
I use both: rsnapshot for my overnight backup (I used to use compressed tar beckups and this brought the backup time down from 3 hours to 8 minutes AND the backup can be accessed without needing to uncompress/untar anything) and rsync for my weekly backup to the set of disks kept offline in a firesafe.
No need to unzip if you use rsnapshot or rsync, so recovery is faster: just find the file(s) by looking through the directory structure and copy them back.
On a sunny day (Thu, 27 Feb 2020 09:16:00 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Martin Gregorie wrote in :
True
For years I have followed the 3 methods backup system
1) SDcard FLASH
2) normal harddisk (few TB is very cheap) magnetic
3) Blu-ray optical. I stopped with optical for now as I have about 1000 DVDs and blue-rays in a big alu lightproof box, mostly movies though, box is full! Seems magnetic medium still wins. Have not tried any SSD yet, not sure about the reliability of that stuff, price is high too. Any practical experiences? I must say optical when in constant climate and absolute dark still works here after 20 years... And then I have some on M-DISC, should last forever but size is only 4.7 GB.. good for unique movies and music. A 32 GB card image should go on a blu-ray.
Indeed with all that harddisk size zip/unzip is not always needed, using md5sum etc is good, I run verify after making any backup, for that I use dvdimagecmp that I wrote many years ago:
formatting link
diff also works, but this gives more detail.
And keep a database of all you have! For example disk 998 (box holds 1000, was almost last year)
998 Tue Oct 8 12:43:07 CEST 2019 BD-R25GB Mediarange 4x inkjet printable LG BH10LS38 Make sure you habve enough disk space. dd if=/dev/zero bs=100000000 count=242 > bluray.iso mke2fs bluray.iso mount -o loop=/dev/loop0 bluray.iso /mnt/loop cp stuff /mnt/loop/ du /mnt/loop umount /mnt/loop growisofs -speed=4 -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=bluray.iso dvdimagecmp -a bluray.iso -b /dev/dvd # df /dev/loop0 23261268 21022524 1057104 96% /mnt/loop # l/mnt/loop/ total 20977548
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19095 May 7 23:33 xinutop_manual.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2354400000 Oct 3 17:05 last_man_standing_1996.ts amovie
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3172370000 Oct 8 12:39 a_cure_for_wellness_2016__german.ts amovie
1000 entries like this, in a simple textfile use dvd-list.txt | grep amovie to list all movies and it seems I have more than UK TV seems to have... endless repeats there...
283 movies.... LOL
cat dvd-list.txt | grep .img
Who needs a databeast? locate cat grep is all ye need!
Sorry got carried away maybe have to buy an extra box for a thousand discs :-)
No, the above isn't about backups, its change management. If something stopped working because of a change to a file in /etc which happened several months ago, will you still have a backup of that file, and how many backups will you have to go through to find that change? Using etc keeper you have a log of every change to the file, so you can identify he breaking change, and either revert it either in whole or part.
I don't trust Optical disks either: I've had several CDs written on PCs become unreadable after 3-4 years, so I no longer use them for storage: a CD RW is, after all only a dye layer that can be selectively changed by a bright light so, unlike a commercial, pressed and aluminised CD is guaranteed to deteriorate over time.
I tried DDS2 tape a while back but, though apparently reliable, was slow and relatively expensive. Plus, at a mere 4GB per cassette, their capacity is far too small for current use.
Now I'm using WD Essentials 1TG and 2TB USB drives which, so far, are proving to be fast and reliable.
The benefit of using rsync or rsnapshot is that the disks are self- indexing because the files are stored in essentially thre same directory structure as the files being backed up.
We used to use DDS2 tapes back in the day. Until we tried to restore from one that had been overwritten every week.
I dont use USB drives. I have a server that backs one spinning rust disk onto another every night. That's proofs me against drive failure. As one disk gets full I reconfigure it and ad a bigger one
If I was really paranoid, I'd arrange a backup at a friends house as well.
Rsync is parsimonious with bandwidth for backups and works OK over slowish internet connections.
--
Canada is all right really, though not for the whole weekend.
"Saki"
On a sunny day (Thu, 27 Feb 2020 20:56:16 +0000) it happened druck wrote in :
I have backups of the whole system every so many days. But really, if you get lost in something as simple as some config file maybe better spent some time on figuring out how the system works. I do think that Linux is being changed into the usual crap, systemd, alsa, xorg comes to mind, my opinion. OTOH as a platform to play around with... where will it go? my raspis are still reliable, some on 24/7 for years....
What I do editing config files is make a copy cp xxxconfig xxxconfig.org and then rewrite it Can always go back. No need for yet an other silly tool. Or just keep the old text in the config file as comment. I do that even with scripts I wrote myself and change, same scripts for different systems, just 2 days ago, small C program, added a #define to select either x86 or arm / raspi the header, it calls netcat, Wy the ???xx do people always change command line options? netcat on my x86 has different options than the raspi version! WHEN will people list the command line options ALPHABETICALLY in --help?
On a sunny day (Fri, 28 Feb 2020 00:15:36 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Martin Gregorie wrote in :
I think it is a bit like photograps, exposure time, so light intensity * time. I had DVDs go bad in a few hours that were kept in those transparent boxes on a bookshelf where part of the day the sun directly hits it. From the light proof alu case 20 years old CDs I burned still work fine.
On a sunny day (Sat, 29 Feb 2020 11:59:37 +0000) it happened druck wrote in :
Actually no, because after the first edit that worked I knew HOW it worked and no more need for .ORG backup as shown somewhere recenty the latest will be in the main backup made every so many days, Actually I see only one in /etc/now usb_modeswitch.conf.ORG
But that was IIRC related to changing a new Huawei USB modem type. What I edited with 'joe' editor is always backuped with extention '~' I do make sure the ~ is the same as the original if it works, so it is a backup in case some file is deleted,
so raspi95: /etc # l *~
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2919 Jan 28 2012 zshenv~
-rwx------ 1 root root 669 Oct 21 16:42 sudoers.tmp~*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1881 Oct 24 11:27 passwd~
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12 Nov 4 19:10 hostname~
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 490 Nov 8 16:09 rc.local~*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2903 Nov 9 21:07 hosts~
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39 Nov 13 08:49 resolv.conf.GOOGLE~
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39 Nov 13 08:49 resolv.conf~
and 'l' in my zsh (and bash but I always use zsh, saves years of typing) stands for ls -rtl 'lb' stands for ls -rtl --color=none I use google as nameserver, not the ISPs.
For example zshenv comes from an other system.. Of course not all (most are not) config files are in /etc/ this is just an example.
Make a main backup image of the card if you have fear or root fear :-) whenever you make sort of important changes.
FYI after being root on so many systems since 1998 when I started with SLS Linux (soft landing systems Linux) many years ago I once accidently did rm -rf /* (was a typo). Was fast with ctrlC, but not fast enough it did wipe out some X libs. Took maybe an hour to get it back from the DVD .. How many hours do people spent typing sudo ? in 22 years? sudo rm -rf /* Does this raspi thing actually ask confirmation? LOL
Well I will leave it at this, everybody their thing.
BTW do NOT I repeat NOT type the above sudo command.......
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.