[NTLUG:Discuss] Backing up an FC6 desktop?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Sep 08, 2008 at 03:38:28PM -0500, terry wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 8:34 AM, John K. Taber <jktaber at charter.net> wrote:
> >
> > Mondo at first looked attractive for backing up my FC6 desktop. But
> > Googling the forums
> > reveals that Mondo has a problem with LVM, which I have.
> >
> > I like the idea of a bootable backup media (I'm thinking CDs), and
> > complete restore.
> >
> > Any ideas?
>
> [...many good suggestions, including the following...]
> Large enough USB drive:
>   tar -cvzf /media/disk/home.tgz /home
>          (after plugging in the device and mounting it under /media/disk )
>          (this gives you a tar'd and  compressed file containing all
> user directories and accompaning files)
> ...

One can also use rsync with USB or other locally-mounted drives:

    rsync -av /media/disk/home /home

A nice advantage of rsync over tar is that once the first rsync
has been done, one can re-rsync to the usb drive and only the 
changed files get copied.  It's also easy to get to individual 
files off the USB disk if desired, instead of having to use tar 
to search through the entire tar file.  Also you don't end up 
with a huge .tgz file (which if corrupted early could cause 
you to lose the entire backup).

One advantage of tar over rsync is that the data can be archived
compressed (i.e., the -z option) but that hasn't been an issue
for me.

I have a WD Passport 160GB USB drive that I use for exactly this 
purpose; with rsync it's easy and quick to do backups incrementally, 
and if I need to take my data with me somewhere I can quickly and
portably do that.

Pm