What is the best strategy to back up to a USB drive?

Hi All
I am going to buy a USB drive for backup and have a few questions that might have been worked out by others. These drives come pre-formatted with vfat. My first inclination would be to use rsync to perform the backup but vfat can't hold all of the permissions, ownership, etc. that are required. I think I would end up in trouble with tar as well. Ultimately, the tar file would be too large. Thus, I guess I would have to break it up somehow. Anyways, is there a good strategy for performing such a backup?
Thanks
Kev
Last edited by iKevin (2007-02-11 14:48:06)

How about manual? :-)
Permissions
Synchronizing the permission bits of files is slightly tricky when two different filesytems are involved (e.g., when synchronizing a Windows client and a Unix server). In detail, here's how it works:
When the permission bits of an existing file or directory are changed, the values of those bits that make sense on both operating systems will be propagated to the other replica. The other bits will not be changed.
When a newly created file is propagated to a remote replica, the permission bits that make sense in both operating systems are also propagated. The values of the other bits are set to default values (they are taken from the current umask, if the receiving host is a Unix system).
For security reasons, the Unix setuid and setgid bits are not propagated.
The Unix owner and group ids are not propagated. (What would this mean, in general?) All files are created with the owner and group of the server process.
EDIT:
I'd suggest reading this and/or this and/or this first to find which backup system is the best for you.
There are many programs which should work in your case you and many "meta" systems that should make it easier to configure (like backupninja for example).
I think you should also reconsider using vfat. It's not the best choice for a backup system. Ext3 would do much better and make it much simplier. You can always reformat the hd back to vfat under linux. For large hds it's actually easier to do that under linux (XP has a 35 GB limit when formatting vfat partitions...).
Last edited by lanrat (2007-02-13 13:50:34)

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Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2013 16:53:44 -0800
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: What's the best way to back up to the cloud?
    Re: What's the best way to back up to the cloud?
    created by JimHess in Photoshop Lightroom - View the full discussion
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orionsm42 wrote:
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