Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (180 mails)

[Simon Wood <Simon.Wood@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings fellow Linux Users,

I'm having difficulty getting my head around the concept of using
CD-R's for backup, and backup in general. I would like to back up 
areas of my machine totalling around 300MByte


I can see that there are two ways.....
1) I can take an area of the file-system and write it direct to
a CD. This has the advantage that it can easily be mounted by 
a novice user to view/recover a deleted file.

2) I can TAR up areas of file-system into single files (i.e.
backup-home-20Jul2001.tar.gz) and store these somewhere. I can 
even get a little bit more adventurous and do incremental
backups where I only store the files that have changed.



My trouble comes with the concept/desire to use multi-session
CD so I don't waste large areas of the disks.

Can somebody please explain (in simple terms) how the sessions of 
multi-session CD blend together and how the file names (or new, 
deleted or changed files) appear in the directories.

For the 1) situation will this remove my ability to recover a file 
to a state before it was changed?

There is also the question on security of data, once written to CD
it is in theory readable by anyone who can get their hands on the
CD. Has anyone tried encrypting the resultant file/image, with
GPG for example?


If the best way is to use tar (or something similar), is there an easy
to follow method for restoring a particular file from a given day?



Of course there may be an application that will do all this for me,
any recommendations.

Thanks in advance,
Simon Wood