Re: [gentoo-user] How to build a time machine on Gentoo

["Maximilian Bräutigam" <max-braeu@gmx.de>]

Hi

Am 16.08.2010 01:11, schrieb Nganon:
> Hello all,
> 
> My first post on the list. I thought I would start with something that I
> started
> to think of as 'essential' after losing 90GB of data. Now I have two main
> questions in mind: what to and how to back up on gentoo most efficiently.
> 
> 1. Apart from users' home directories and the followings, what should be
> backed
> up on a gentoo machine? 
> /etc/portage/
> /root
> /var/lib/portage
> ...?

You should backup all in / except
/tmp/*
/sys/*
/proc/*
/lost+found/*
/dev/*

I have no solution how to bzip or gzip your backups or how to make a dvd
backup, but I use "app-backup/rsnapshot" which uses rsync but implements
an intelligent rotating system that is done daily, weekly, monthly,
yearly according to your config. Of course you should store the backup
on another physical hdd.

By the way, since a new hdd of one TB is pretty cheap, think about
running your gentoo in a software RAID. Guides:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86+raid+lvm2-quickinstall.xml
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Software_RAID_Install

Kind regards,
der Max

> 2. Erm..okay, I am gonna say, what magic I want and then ask your way.
> I first started making gzipped tar balls as follows:
> 
> tar czpf /media/backups/userA-`date +%Y.%m.%d`.tgz -X userA-excludelist /etc
> 
> But these can get huge especially for home dirs. I also want safe dvd
> copies. 
> Though I can find enough space on the external drives, I don't trust them
> any more. See above..sigh..(No I recovered about one third of it with
> testdisk/photorec  
> which names them as file000001 file00002.. and half them are zero
> sized.. which 
> quite justifies my agony)
> 
> Here is what I wanna do. I want to have only one big backup for, say,
> userA-2010.08.07.tgz and other small backup tars containing only the
> files/folders that were modified since last update, 2010.08.07, as
> userA-diff-2010.08.14.tgz, userA-diff-2010.08.21.tgz,
>  userA-diff-2010.08.28.tgz
> etc. Now if I want to take the userA back to the future, 2010.08.21,  I
> want to
> do it by first extracting the huge tar userA-2010.08.07.tgz and then the
> tiny
> backup userA-diff-2010-08-21.tgz. 
> 
> But the thing is I don't know how to do this. I am hoping maybe you can
> tell me 
> how to of it as well as a better way of doing backups. 
> 
> By the way, since I want dvd backups as well, and I want to use +rw dvds
> so I 
> can overwrite old backup after a while, what is best way of ensuring the 
> integrity and safety of them. Is it a good idea to use truecrypt
> containers? Or 
> nothing tops signing and encrypting with gpg?
> 
> Thanks for any comment in advance. 
>