After system didaster how to prepare / save most important data ?

[Paul Dwerryhouse]

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 11:27:17AM +0800, SYNass IT Ubuntu / Linux wrote:
> 1st: Save /home completely to a USB stick or external USB HDD !
> 2nd: additionally Backup Evolution to a separate USB stick !!
> 3rd - Thunderbird offers an import feature: How do I get Thunderbird's
> data exported ???
> 4th: any further hints and suggestions are very appreciated !!??

Other alternatives are DVD (if your data size is under 4Gb) or tape (if
you can afford it). Backing up to an external HDD is ok, but if you only
have one of them, you then don't really have the option to take your
backed-up data offsite.

> After having all important data extracted ...
> ... how can I verify to have good backups / saves ??

If you're doing your backups with tar, it has a verify option: -W or
--verify. Other archivers have verify options, also. 

One thing to note is, though, that these all rely on your data not changing
when you back it up, which might be easy for some filesystems, but much
more difficult for others (eg, /var or /home).

One way around this issue is to use LVM to create your partitions, then
take snapshots of them, and back-up those, so they don't change.

Cheers,

Paul

-- 
Paul Dwerryhouse                             	| PGP Key ID: 0x6B91B584
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