[ubuntu-uk] Packard Bell, what wonderful support!

[Gareth France]

Agreed, in principle. However there are issues which prevent me from 
doing this. Not something I can go into and as I've said before the 
backups I do have aren't made in such a way that they could be useable 
as is if my laptop were unusable for some reason.

On 10/05/13 07:43, Colin Law wrote:
> On 9 May 2013 12:14, Gareth France <gareth.france at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ...
>> I don't have anything 500gb in size to do a full backup onto and I'm not
>> comfortable handing out my business' data at all.
> You can use something like clonezilla to do the backup.  This backs up
> only the used portion of the disc and also compresses it so that you
> will not need anything like 500GB (assuming you have not got vast
> amounts of data).  I think you mentioned that you had a 40GB (or
> similar) disk that you had the data on in the first place, this should
> be plenty large enough for the clonezilla backup.
>
> It may be, however, that you only need to backup your home directory
> in which case you need even less space.  You can then safely clear
> that out before sending the disk back.
>
> In fact I would recommend that you do both the above.  Make sure that
> you can recover the data from your home directory backup before you
> clear it.
>
> You could also consider encrypting your home directory [1] in which
> case you can just leave the data there, unless you think it is so
> sensitive that someone would want to spend a very large amount of time
> trying to crack your password to extract the data.  Back it up first
> however.
>
> Probably the cheapest way to get some additional backup space is to
> buy a disk from ebay along with an external USB caddy to put it in.
> You should be able to get something like a 350GB disk and a caddy for
> £25 or thereabouts.  If you have an old desktop machine then even
> cheaper is to get just a disk off ebay and add that in to the desktop
> machine.
>
> I have to agree with others that have posted that you should in fact
> have multiple backups if the data is important.  A disk can go up in
> smoke (metaphorically or literally) at any time, and the internet is
> full of requests for help from those who have had a single backup and
> discovered when they need it that the backup is not recoverable for
> some reason.
>
> Colin
>
> [1] http://www.howtogeek.com/116032/how-to-encrypt-your-home-folder-after-installing-ubuntu/
>