backup

[NoOp]

On 07/06/2009 06:14 PM, Daryl Styrk wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 02:11:00PM -0700, John Heinen wrote:
>> A large retailer is offerering a seagate 250 mb backup hard drive  at a
>> fair price, including various programs for backups etc, for windows only.
>>  I know very ltitlle about backups except cpoying files to a cd/dvd. How
>> would I backup ubuntu and other linuxs to such a drive? John

> rsync
> rdiff-backup
> tar
> dd
> 
> Are all great starts.  See the man pages for each, and google around for
> examples of each.  I personally use rsync and rdiff-backup daily. 
> 
> something like 
> rsync -avh --progress --delete /home/daryl/Mail /media/disk/Backups/Mail
> 
> or
> 
> rdiff-backup --exclude ~/Downloads --exclude ~./firefox --include ~/Mail
> myhome.server.backup::/home/me/Backups/diffs
> 
> Lots of examples out there.. Play around with some fake files/dir (use
> touch) to see how everything works. 
> 
> 

I have to admit that after several years of reading these posts my eyes
glaze over when someone posts your advise. I suspect John (and other
Ubuntu users) will as well. This is not intended to offend you, but John
stated "I know very ltitlle about backups except cpoying files to a
cd/dvd". While your suggestions may be excellent for an experienced
linux/unix user, it probably does little to help John out.

So, please provide/point to simple instructions/tutorials if you can.

Note: I'm also interested because I'm in process of figuring out how to
transfer/clone a 20Gb laptop hard drive to a 40Gb networked hard drive,
and then install a 30Gb hard drive in the laptop & restore from the 20Gb
backup. This would be similar to John backing up his existing system to
the new USB drive & restoring it... only difference perhaps would be
that he is using an attached device while I am using a networked device.