How best to make daily routine backups from netbook to 2 external HD's?

[Ioannis Vranos]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Greg Zeng <gregzeng at gmail.com> wrote:
> <quote> My experiences so far can be summarised as follows.
> http://luckybackup.sourceforge.net/
> I successfully managed to make a complete backup of the WHOLE home
> directory to the biggest external HD: "WD Elements" , 2 Terabytes. The
> strange aspect of this experience is the way in which that HD has been
> formatted: NTFS. But there was not one single error report.

Keep in mind that if you just copied and pasted the files, they did
not preserve their Linux file permissions.


> My question is: what best to do with the big external HD? Leaving it
> as it is now while continuing to use it? Or is it better to reformat
> it into EXT4 and making a new backup afterwords? <endquote>

EXT4 is far superior to NTFS.

EXT4 has a very fast full filesystem check, it protects very much
against file/directory fragmentation, it provides fast deletion of
many files and large files, etc.

I suggest, if you do not use the disk in some Windows installation, to
replace NTFS with EXT4.


> In Australia, I do this too, but to a compressed NTFS 2tb partition,
> USB2.  NTFS-compressed, is an advanced version of BTRFS, imo.  It
> already has it's file checkers, unerase apps, defrag, etc.
>
> In Win7, I then run 'Doublekiller' to remove duplicates, by filesize &
> checksum recognition.  Yet to find a Linux app to do this.

For my backups, I am using Grsync, which is a GUI rsync front end.

To have completely identical data of one directory, in another, I have
selected ONLY the following options in Grsync:

Basic Options: Preserve time, Preserve owner, Preserve permissions,
Preserve group, Delete on destination, Verbose, Show transfer
progress.

Advanced Options: Preserve devices (it includes and the --specials
command line option), Copy symlinks as symlinks, Protect remote args.

For Preferences, select the ones you want.


>
> Since all my data files of every op sys (Win7-64, Win-XP-32, + 4
> version of Ubuntu, both pae-32 & 64 bit) are on NTFS-compressed
> partitions.  Not NTFS-3G because I want both compression & encryption.

Keep in mind, that in the upcoming Microsoft ReFS, which will replace
NTFS eventually, File compression and File level encryption were
removed.


-- 
Ioannis Vranos

http://cppsoftware.binhoster.com