Everyone knows that performing backups is a critical computer practice, but many people don't. Who can blame them given the general inconvenience and lack of easy approaches. Here is how I do backups, in case it helps someone to get started doing their own backups.

Nightly, my computers are backed up to large capacity external eSATA/USB hard drives (moving to Western Digital, read Seagate post below). External drives are rotated out for safer storage from physical damage. I did use tape a decade ago, but comparing the cost of tape to hard drives, I can't see any advantage of tape.

On Windows XP I use EMC/Dantz Retrospect. This is a fantastic product capable of making incremental encrypted rotating backups. However, it's very complicated, about $100, and the clients (one Retrospect license comes with five client licenses) are problematic, especially the Linux client. Also, version 7 has problems running on Windows 7. Given version 8 came out recent on the Mac, perhaps an update of the Windows version is in the works.

On Windows 7 I use the built-in backup tool. It's slower than Retrospect and requires more space to perform an equivalent backup, but it's built-in and just plain works, including being able to backup open files. It's nicely integrated into the shell allowing easy review of previous versions of any file. It's a solution that anyone could use.

On Linux (Fedora 11) I use the open source rsync wrapped in a simple script. This approach provides a snapshot of the directories I backup, incrementals, and text logs. The incrementals are stored in separate directories organized by date, each containing the files of the previous snapshots that have been changed (or been deleted). I don't backup ACLs (I've never had a need for them) and rsync provides regular expressions to exclude files and directories. Given the snapshot is a duplicate of the directory structure, one never has to worry about being able to retrieve files from a proprietary backup format. I really like the rsync approach.

$ cat /home/backup.sh
#!/bin/bash

DATE=`date '+%Y%m%d-%H:%M:%S'`

mkdir -p /backup/full /backup/log /backup/inc/$DATE

rsync --archive                               \
      --backup --backup-dir=/backup/inc/$DATE \
      --out-format='%i %l %n%L'               \
      --stats                                 \
      --human-readable --human-readable       \
      --delete --delete-excluded              \
      --exclude '/home/*/.gvfs'               \
      --exclude '/home/*/.ccache'             \
      --exclude '/home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*/*Cache' \
      --exclude '/home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite*' \
      --exclude '/home/*/.wapi'               \
      --one-file-system                       \
      /etc /home /backup/full                 \
      &> /backup/log/$DATE

bzip2 -9 /backup/log/$DATE



$ cat /home/complete_restore.sh
#!/bin/bash

DATE=`date '+%Y%m%d-%H:%M:%S'`

rsync --archive                               \
      --out-format='%i %l %n%L'               \
      --stats                                 \
      --human-readable --human-readable       \
      --one-file-system                       \
      /backup/full/home/ /home