On Saturday 25 May 2024 at 20:07:55, nisp1953 via Dng wrote:

> I need advice on ways to backup my /home user account. I have been using tar
> but I am hoping the list can advise me of a better backup method or Debian
> (Devuan) package that I can use.
> I'd prefer something that does incremental backups.

My first question is "what / where can you, or do you want to, backup this data
to?"

I mean, are you trying to simply create a copy elsewhere on the same machine,
do you want to copy it across a network to another machine, are you writing to
removable media such as tape / disk / USB stick / whatever people use these
days?

Also, what is your reason for preferring incremental backups?

They may be smaller than full backups, but they're more fiddly to restore from,
you still need to do full backups from time to time anyway, and depending on
the media you're writing to and the reliability of being able to restore from
it when you need to, a failure in any of the incremental backups since the
last full one means you lose data, so in some ways the risk is higher with
incrementals.

Finally, what sort of quantity of data are you talking about - "du -sh ~"?


Antony.

--
Never automate fully anything that does not have a manual override capability.
Never design anything that cannot work under degraded conditions in emergency.

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