RE: [rdiff-backup-users] external hard disk backups - best practice

[Sam Liddicott]

My advice is to just do a 3 way rsync.

That way you can find and restore your backed up files without any special 
tools, reducing the risk of the backup tool either trashing your data or the 
backups (rdiff-backup deleted all my backups while doing a backup)

Hard links used in a 3 way rsync (the 3rd way being a reference to the last 
non-incremental backup) mean you save space for unchanged files.

You won't get the space saving when large files change slightly, but that is 
more than made up for by not getting the space back when rdiff-backup deletes 
all your data.

Sam

-----Original Message-----
From: Warren Guy <address@hidden>
Sent: 17 March 2008 02:51
To: address@hidden
Subject: [rdiff-backup-users] external hard disk backups - best practice

mortee wrote:
> Thanks. However, the real problem here is that the backup disk is a 
> NetBSD FFS2, which unfortunately does a much more thorough job when 
> deleting files/directories. Namely, it literally erases all metadata 
> regarding the stuff, so, although the file data blocks are still 
> physically on the disk, I can't even determine which ones used to belong 
> to one file, not to mention file names and directory structure. It would 

While this won't help you get your data back, perhaps a point that can 
be made from your unfortunate story is the importance of maintaining 
more than one set of backups. A second backup set would potentially 
allow recovery of data in this and other circumstances where recovery 
from another backup disk fails for whatever reason.

Perhaps others can add other "best practice" tips they have, for the 
benefit of current and future readers of the list?

Warren