G T Smith wrote:
The classic backup everything in sight approach while simple is probably rarely appropriate for most cases.
right. a good backup strategy must first know what kind of data is to be backed up... The "bussiness" case you sepak of is not bussiness but server one. in case of server crash, the recovery speed is important, and the important thing is the system - so better have two in sync machines :-) other kind of data are of roughly three types: * small files (letters, most documents... desktop work). The backup should be of _user_ responsability. In my Highschool, all the users where warned than _no backup_ whas ever made and than computer being shared where periodically erased and restored, so no data should stay on a computer. so use medias or lose your data... * big database files. this is a very professional issue (several Tb of data, no medaia available), I wont say anything about it * beta tester type. Very frequent here :-). We live with hudge files (dvd isos) of very time limited value. who cares of 10.0 Alpha 2 dvd??? so why backup this at all? On these computers, the only usable way I found is to have the data parsed in specialized contents. My photos, my videos, my musiocs are all in data chunks less than a dvd size, frequently writen so if one dvd appear to be bad, little is lost and any other time the data is immediately available. I do not rely on any error recovery system, when one error come, there are often many, too much and when my system fails completely I build a new one from scratch, I use this to have a fresh openSUSE :-). My backup is a paper written HOWTO :-) jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://gourmandises.orangeblog.fr/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org