(sorry everybody for the other, uncomplete reply, I hit the wrong button)
Les,
thanks for the quick and detailed answer, specific comments below.
On Thu, August 9, 2007 3:12 pm, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Personally, I like backuppc running over the network from some other
> machine to do this grunge work automatically, but if you only have one
> machine I'd looke at rdiff-backup.
Yes, this is my case right now: backing up the content of one home
computer, without using another computer for it.
>> create something that is completely readable with any operating system
>> (including hidden files, links, long file names...): what if I need to
>> recover files from there from a friend's Mac or Windows laptop? This is
>> a filesystem question, so how would I format/ (re) create it?
>
> ...With portable drives it will be hard to
> both maintain all attributes and be able to read it on anything.
> FAT-formatted USB drives are the only thing that will work across
> linux/windows/mac
Yes, I had this impression, thanks for confirming it.
> Rsync will do this, if the disk format lets you use it.
which is not the case of FAT file systems, right?
>> 1) What about reliability of hard disk versus DVD based backups?
>> Links to relevant reading are welcome.
>
> Keep several copies, regardless. Maybe your best solution is to use an
> ext3 USB drive as the main backup, preserving attributes and do separate
> DVDs or VFAT disks for the files you might want to use elsewhere.
Now that I think about it, I like it. Hard drive as main backup for
everything, extra copy of critical files on DVD for portability. This
could both reduce overall backup costs and also have the added advantage
that I could _boot_ from such an hard drive and "just keep working" if the
one inside the case crashes, right? What is the best way to make an
initial mirror of the PC drive on the USB one so it becomes bootable?
doing rsync on it after that would be easy.
Further comments and tips are welcome!
Marco
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