[plug] Current state / method / best programs to backup home desktop Ubuntu 13.04

[Shanon Loughton]

haha ok - hard to convey cheekiness in text...

My home setup on this machine is more simple.  A flat 240GB SSD, the auto
Ubuntu install I guess did 8 or 16GB swap so 220GB on /

On splitting /home and /.  There is overlap with a lot of config in home
directory which relates to installed packages on / so I want to keep them
together.  Furthermore, its a gaming machine so I use wine a bit, which
increases the important configs in home directory.  And being a gaming, not
so much work and more things like documents going to Google Drive, it will
be fine backed only on the install or removal of each game.  Almost as if
it was a LAN centre config, which you could deploy to many PCs.  Finally
downloaded audio / video / media are done on another system so no backup
needed for that.

So far, my installed setup is 75GB.  It will prob grow to 100GB and that
will include most of what I want installed.  So I could backup to the same
drive, which would make recovery really quick.  That solves the Unity
breaking itself problem.  I have another Ubuntu machine networked with HDDs
in it - we could rsync or scp to that for occasional full backup to
mitigate SSD failure.

cheers






On 13 August 2013 19:00, Brad Campbell <brad at fnarfbargle.com> wrote:

> On 13/08/13 12:11, Shanon Loughton wrote:
>
>> Brad thanks for the offer, Id love you to help setup my backup system,
>> thanks!
>>
>>
> Ok, Shannon. Let's make this a public process.
>
> I've done this quite a few times for myself, but it has recently been
> pointed out to me that things I take for granted and feel are obvious, are
> not necessarily so for other people. Therefore I don't tend to run a
> process, I just jump from the question to the answer. If we make this a
> process, you are more likely to get what you need rather than what I
> blindly assume will work best (ie, what I know). Plus, doing it this way
> will give us (you and I) both the opportunity to learn from those that know
> this stuff better than we do.
>
> Lets start with what we know you have.
> A) A machine with Ubuntu 13.04 on it.
>
> How is the disk set up? For example, a df -h on my desktop gives me :
>
> brad at bkmac:~/config$ df -h
> Filesystem            Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sdb5              55G   30G   23G  57% /
> none                  7.9G  4.8M  7.9G   1% /dev
> none                  7.9G   30M  7.8G   1% /tmp
> none                  1.6G  128K  1.6G   1% /run
> none                  5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
> none                  7.9G  112K  7.9G   1% /run/shm
> srv:/s/work           550G  314G  209G  61% /media/work
> srv:/s/src             19T   13T  5.3T  72% /media/src
> /dev/mapper/home      459G  150G  287G  35% /home
>
> Root is on sdb5 (bootcamp on an iMac). home is on /dev/mapper/home which
> in reality is a LUKS encrypted volume sitting on /dev/sda1 (which is a
> 500GB SSD that is double-sided taped in the back of the iMac).
>
> So when I back up, I back up / & home separately.
>
> What do you plan to back up to? I backup to a WD mybook live which is
> running Debian and has a LUKS encrypted data volume.
>
> I've also been known to back up to arbitrary machines over nfs, or USB
> hard disks.
>
> Given you want a full snapshot (at least one) your backup drive needs at
> *least* as much storage as the machine you are backing up.
>
> I backup my desktop, laptop, 2 co-lo boxes, a VDS, the root, home &
> business partitions of my server and a separate backup of all my VM's in
> under 2TB. My WD mybook has 60 days of rotating backups with plenty of
> space to spare. The media backups happen manually to a second machine that
> is basically a box of disks chained together and don't feature in any of
> this.
>
> Backup bandwidth is a real issue if you change big stuff daily, and also
> for the first backup. Because the mybook is encrypted and does not have
> hardware acceleration, I can get at best about 6MB/s into it. As long as
> I'm not backing up 30G virtual disk files, I can get all my backups done in
> less than a couple of hours at night.
>
> USB backups suffer the same bandwidth limitations (although I believe USB3
> is supposed to be a bit better).
>
>
>
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