On Sunday 26 May 2024 at 20:08:19, nisp1953 via Dng wrote:

> On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 9:26 AM Antony Stone wrote:
>
> > 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.

> I am backing up about 34 GB of data. It's small but important.

In that case I would not even consider incremental backups - I would take a
full backup every day, and write it to a different directory (or even
partition) on the external drive. I cannot imagine you are using disks
smaller than 7 x 34 Gb = 238 Gbytes.

I mention using separate partitions because with modern GPT partitioning you
can have (I think) up to 256 partitions on a physical device (compared to 7
with MBR), and a file system could become corrupt more likely than the entire
disk becoming unreadable, so keeping each day in a different partition is safer
than creating daily subdirectories in a single file system.

In my opinion one of the most important things about a backup system is "how
simple is it to identify where the data I need to restore is?" and the next
most important is "how simple is it to restore that data?" possibly without
wanting to restore the entire backup.

Therefore a simple direct copy of the data in a normal file system which you
can look through and copy from, using completely standard commands, would be
my preference.


Antony.

--
Anyone that's normal doesn't really achieve much.

- Mark Blair, Australian rocket engineer

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