Backup

[David Fletcher]

On Thu, 2016-11-03 at 05:42 +0200, Errol Sapir wrote:
> Data is anything I have created or copied. Documents, photos, email
> 
In my home directory I have always (since windows 95) had a directory
called Work in which I store all documents I have created such as
letters I write, spreadsheets, forms that I've filled in and scanned so
that I have a copy before posting them. My entire /home/ directory then
gets compressed into a tar file periodically, put through gpg
symmetrical encryption for security, then copied to multiple flash
storage devices. These type of files of mine, plus similar files
created by my son, come to about 4GB at the moment.

When you need to restore these files it's easy to just unpack the tar
file somewhere other than /home/ and move your Work directory back to
where it needs to be.

If you use Evolution as an email client/contacts store, you can
periodically do a dump of everything into a dedicated backup file
somewhere in your Work directory. This can easily be imported back into
Evolution if you need to do a bare metal rebuild. I know this because
I've done it more than once.

My photos and music files and everything else that's a bit big are
stored elsewhere, in a dedicated directory in /. At the moment I use
rsync to copy these to my laptop hard drive plus a USB hard drive for
backup. My media storage is not as large as some, though, and when
128GB SD cards come down in price some more I'll purchase one or two of
these for additional, off site backups.

Dave