On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 9:26 AM Antony Stone
<Antony.Stone@???> wrote:
>
> 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 should have mentioned that. I back them up to external USB hard
drives. I have 2 hard
drives. I keep one in a safety deposit box at the bank. I backup to
the other one all
throughout the week. The following Monday, I swap hard drives.
>
> Also, what is your reason for preferring incremental backups?

I have used dump and restore a lot and it did incremental backups. I
see there is a package in
the Devuan repository for dump but it has not been maintained for a long time..

> 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 ~"?
>
I am backing up about 34 GB of data. It's small but important. It's
the daily entries
into GnuCash for my business. Also the scans of nightly cash register
tapes and
credit card purchases from Square.