lunes, 10 de septiembre de 2007

Backup with Rsync under Linux

UNLESS YOU'VE GOT a couple of mirrored hard drives to ensure that a disk failure won't send all of your precious data to that great bit-bucket in the sky, you need to backup your data.

Surely some of your data is very important to you, whether it's email, school or work papers, professional records and works in progress, financial and tax records, photos, music or films, whatever. For me, it's about 10 years of professional output plus email and some digital photos and music. I'd hate to lose all of that, so I make sure that I back up all my data regularly.

If you're like most of us, you might have a CD or DVD burner in your system, and that's fine for periodic backups. But how often do you remember to do that, burn a backup CD or DVD? Once a month? Once every six months? Maybe once a year, if you're lucky? It's better to have an automatic backup process.

If you run Windows, you can buy backup programs to copy all your data to a second hard disk, an external hard disk or even tape. All you need is the money to buy the software plus the storage media. So if you run Windows, there are commercial data backup resources available to you, and good luck to you.

Commercial backup software is available for Linux as well, but unless you're running a data center for a business those are likely more, and more expensive, than you really need. If you run Linux, you're fortunate because Linux includes system features and utilities that make it easy to automate backups. Here I'll show how to set up a daily backup to a second hard disk.

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