Critique my backup solution please, suggestions?

Question

My system generally looks like this:-
/home/data has the majority of my 'work', its a separate partition (by far the largest).
/home is also a separate partition. /home/ngoonee doesn't have much, just configs and stuff I was lazy to move (about 20 MB).
Under /home I have:-
/home/LinuxProg - some programs which are outside pacman management (Matlab and small utils) as well as my wine/dosbox drives (20 GB...)
/home/scripts and /home/shortcuts - my own utility scripts and some .desktop files which I link to /usr/share/applications for those scripts (I use gnome and gnome-do).
Previously I would simply backup /home/data using rsync and tar up /home to a single 20+GB file. The reason for that backup configuration was basically that my external hard disc was NTFS.
Today I decided to reformat the external hard disc, will be splitting its space between NTFS and ext3. So I have the following plan:-
rsync for /home/data to the NTFS partition, since some data there would sometimes be used by Windows systems.
rsync for /home/LinuxProg to the ext3 partition, since the wine prefixes especially need the links maintained, which NTFS can't do.
rdiff-backup for /home/ngoonee - incremental backups of my configs sounds good
rdiff-backup for /home/scripts and /home/symlinked - see above
rdiff-backup for /etc - I haven't backed this up before, but figure I may as well. Would have to run this one as root.
Any comments? Seems simple enough. Are there better tools for the job (rdiff-backup seems to be best recommended on our wiki)?

Answer 1

ngoone,
I feel that the most useful backup strategy involves historic backups rotated over several periods of time. My linux experience at this point does not allow me to provide you with the tools to do such. But here's what I have learned way back in the early 90s when I was a junior maintaining an IBM ES9000 and a VAX/VMS in Alcatel, and adapted to what I believe could be your requirements (I've been using similar strategies on my own systems ever since):
Daily Backups:
1. Keep a daily sync backup of what you want to manage
2. Rotate the daily backups over a period of 1 week (working days, or full weeks depending on your computer usage pattern)
Weekly backups:
1. Keep a weekly sync backup from the last daily backup that week
2. Rotate the weekly backups over a period of 1 month
Usually the need to restore happens across small time spans (e.g. you need the backup from yesterday because you messed up with some files). However you are also guaranteed sync access to a full weekly backup in daily intervals and a full monthly backup in weekly intervals, in case things did get hectic.
You'll also note I don't take diff backups in a high regard But for completeness, you may want to maintain an history backup on top of that (a diff monthly backup that you do at the end of each month).
Of course you can adjust all this to your needs (personally I usually like to span daily backups over a larger period of time while still maintaining weekly backups). Maybe you will want to ignore the brunt of all this. But, as far as my humble opinion goes, no backup strategy is sound without you taking an historic approach to it. For even better security, include ewaller advise above into all this.
Note:
This is a disk hog. But for all the better reasons. Personally, I'd rather have a dedicated disk or partition for my backup needs.
Last edited by marfig (2010-08-23 13:08:13)