Backing up to an external FAT32 disk

[Liam Proven]

On 12/07/07, Felipe Figueiredo <philsf79 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 12 July 2007 13:28:06 Derek Broughton wrote:
> > Liam Proven wrote:
> >
> > > I am trying to backup a 98% full RAID array (some 100GB of stuff) onto
> > > a 400GB FAT32 USB2 external hard drive. I don't have space on the RAID
> > > itself to create the archive, nor on my 3G root FS.
> > ...
> > > Friends have suggested using tar with -FL and a call to mktemp to
> > > split the archive into randomly-named 4G chunks, but then I can't see
> > > how I'd restore it again; how will tar work out what the next volume
> > > to examine is?
> > ...
> > > I'm not wedded to using tar - I'd consider dump or something as well.
> >
> > kdar, using 'dar', has a very neat ability to slice its output into any size
> > you want.  It's intended for archiving to CD/DVD, but I don't see why it
> > wouldn't work with a 400G drive.  Of course, it's a KDE app...
>
> It's a great program. Unfortunately, unmaintained.
>
> OTOH, the OP could just use dar, instead of the suggested solutions with tar.
>
> Should be as simple as
>
> dar -v -c usbdrive/raid -R raid/ -s 4G
>
> If you need compression, include -z (gzip) or -y (bzip2).
>
> dar(1) manpage is useful. You might want to take a look at options -P (to
> exclude Trash/cache dirs) and -D,  and possibly -K for encryption, should you
> use this for a backup solution.

Obrigado!

I shall try this once the current run of rsync has finished. I am a
belt-and-braces type; I am planning to break up the current 4-disk
RAID5 and replace it with a 6-disk RAID6, so I want at least 2 copies
of my data.

Rsync is OK in this instance, but won't be always, as synching to a
FAT32 volume would lose all Unix file permissions and other metadata.


-- 
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