How do you backup your computers? (Page 1 of 3)

I don't really do 'backups'. I keep a list of every piece of software I install and after a while I add it to my install script. Secondly I keep a list of all my edited system files and I put those in a backup script that backups those system files and my home folder. In case of breakage, I can easily reinstall my system with all the software I had before and I then just copy all the system files and my home folder back to my laptop. It's fast and it works for me

I use a script to backup some home and system setting files to my Dropbox folder. Other files like music, pictures, documents, are backed up manually. And finally once a month (or less), I copy my backed up files to an external hard disk.

Is it bad then, to be running Windows 7?

I use luckyBackup to mirror my data partition to an external drive once a month. Both internal and external data partitions are TrueCrypt-encrypted volumes, so if something gets stolen from my home, at least they can't access my personal data.

No off-site backup, but at least I'll be fine in the case of a hard disk failure.

I've always thought that SpiderOak looked good, but I started with JungleDisk a long time ago and now it would be a pain to switch. Plus JD does everything that I need. They also have a decent Linux client app (although the GUI is only tested with Gnome and KDE), and they also do client-side encryption.

We have a few laptops that we use, but we keep very few files on them (which is convenient, because I like to reformat and try new systems fairly often). I have my old laptop in the storage room set up as a file server (running Gnome LMDE on a 750 MB encrypted drive). We connect to that via wireless and work from it.

We back up the file server both to an external hard drive (also encrypted) and to Jungle Disk in the cloud. When traveling I can mount the Jungle Disk backup as a network drive or access files via the web interface, so I no longer worry about carrying all of our files with us just in case we need something unexpectedly. Recently I've started backup up photos and videos to Picasa web albums instead, however (it makes accessing and sharing them a whole lot easier).

And of course our email, contacts, and calendars are in Google Apps, so we can get at that from anywhere. I use a service called Backupify to back up my email, but I've never actually tried to recover it so I don't know if it works. I also periodically download it into Thunderbird, so if Google were to disappear tomorrow I wouldn't lose all that much.

I had a NAS hard drive die on me and take a lot of my files with it a few years ago, so I decided to be more diligent about backing things up and I definitely sleep easier.

One thing I don't do much is version control (because I don't need it very often), although Jungle Disk does save older versions of the same file for a while just in case.

I don't usually 'back-up' the entire OS.

I do back-up all my /home files, .config files and anything else I think I might want to a 1.5 Tb External Hard-Drive, every so often.

I would rather do a 'fresh install' if I totally b0rk the system.

Strange I always thought the reinstalling mentality was Windows exclusive

Nightly full backup of /etc and /home to another HD using backup-manager, with 5 day's worth saved, via root cron job.

I don't really do to much backing up except for some external harddrives that I use to back up my media, pictures, files, and some programs.

Usually I just do a manual

 cp /home/case/ /media/BOOK/backup/{DATE}

, but I have some old shell scripts from this forum that I've tried before as well. I might use them again soon, and bind them to cron or something.

Seems lotsa good info, thanks for starting the thread, thanks @ folks who shared kewl stuff here too.

Backup ... atm don't do it. Know should ... Don't know if anybody mentioned. I setup a partition to be a recovery partition. Was going to use an archiver prog to backup #! there. Supposedly the target partition only needs to be 1/2 the size of the one you're backing up. Am torn though ... cause haven't decided exactly what to do with it yet. Kinda been wanting to install the new #! iso on it. This is the prog I've been thinking about using for the purpose. Anyone used it for that ... ?

O course the method am babbling about isn't perfect. If hdd conks out etc. More concerned about repairing poss borkage, than really worried about losing #!. Like to tweak stuff, everybody already knows ... tweaking stuff, can lead to borking stuff. If ever finish setting up this recovery partition, wouldn't have to worry about repairing any borkage I inflicted on meself at least. One of the many kewl things about #! though. Don't really have to do much to it. It's already pure gnu/linuxy goodness out of the box anyway. Having a recovery partition could save some time unborking, shrugs. 

Corenominal ... You're da man !

Last edited by CBizgreat! (2012-02-01 08:23:24)

Some common cbiz abbreviations. This will save me time and yet @ same time tell folks what the babble is supposed to mean.

Vll ! = ( Viva la gnu/Linux !)    Vl#!! = ( Viva la #! !)    Last but not least, UD ... OD ! = ( Use Debian ... or die !)

Would it be possible to write or add to the startup or shutdown scripts, just a quick copy-and-paste of the relevant config files to a special Dropbox (or whatever cloud service storage) folder.

As a linux newb trying to educate myself, where would be a good place to start learning this kind of scripting? I'm guessing this would be a bash script and a cron job?