Re: [rdiff-backup-users] SpecialFileError, UpdateError

[Felix E. Klee]

At Tue, 6 Jun 2006 09:16:53 +0000 (GMT),
Chris Wilson wrote:
> For what it's worth, I backup about 30 GB every night between several
> machines, and since it runs overnight, I don't mind that it takes
> about four hours.

I intend to set up nightly backups as well, but often I work on
sth. important, and then I want to make quick backups, e.g. before
taking my laptop out of house.  They should not take more than about 5
minutes.

> > I wonder whether I should simply revert to "rsnapshot" or "star" for
> > doing backups, the latter making it very simple and safe to encrypt
> > and move around backup data (e.g. to copy it to DVDs) as it is
> > stored in TAR archives (which are a bit of a pain when playing back
> > data, though).
> 
> Did you decide against Box Backup?

I haven't tried it yet, but it appears to be quite complex.  "star" has
numerous advantages:

- It's stable and I've a little test suite that I created for it some
  time ago.  I trust it very much.

- Tar files are extremely easy to handle:

  - One can compress and encrypt them at will.

  - The file system containing the backups can be something simple,
    e.g. a Fat32 file system.

  - One can easily write them to DVDs.

  - One can easily send data over the Internet, say every week's dump,
    compressed and encrypted.

- Since only the time stamp of the last backup is needed, one can create
  incremental backups without having access to the lower level dumps.
  For example one can create an incremental dump to a little USB memory
  stick when sitting in the train.

- It's quite fast.

The disadvantage is that it's very cumbersome to get back to old data
since one has to play back, say, three archives.

-- 
Felix E. Klee