Kendall wrote:
> Terry wrote:
>   
>> DVD writer for the cost of a couple of tapes and DVD for  ~AUS50c each.
>> Chunk your data into 4gb or 8Gb packages.
>>     
>
> I started to disagree and figured out that that might make sense while
> writing this. If I did that for all of my files, it would mean writing
> to hundreds of DVDs when I did a full backup.

Tapes are nasty horrible devices!  They're expensive, slow and very 
prone to letting you down just when you need them most (IMHO).  Not only 
that but new (incompatible) tape formats seem to come out all the time 
making archiving very difficult.

For home use I'd recommend an external USB 500GB or 1TB device.  Just 
beware that some of these devices don't appear to be designed for 
continuous use.

I have a small Ubuntu Linux machine which, once a day, sucks the essence 
out of various Windows based laptops on the home network.  I schedule 
the backups during the day so that there's a better chance the machines 
are on and connected (I haven't got it to delay a backup until the 
machine appears online yet).

I chunk the volumes to 4.2GB in case for some reason I have to move them 
using DVD... though that's never happened yet.

Just beware of a slight niggle with backing up some folders on a Windows 
machine.  Even when nobody has used the machine since the last 
incremental backup it still seems to backup a minimum of 1.6GB per 
machine.  I guess this is because Windows seems to use a lot of large 
files of which small areas get altered; resulting in the need to backup 
the whole file.

If Bacula supported an rsync style backup that could somehow only backup 
the bits of each file that have changed instead of the whole file that 
might solve it.

Actually, without this feature backing up onto DVD would be very time 
consuming as you'd have to put in a new one far more often than would be 
practical.

David Legg


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