MBG wiki: Editing Backing-up your home directory

== Zero level backup ==

You should periodically (once a month ?) make a full backup of your area (what is called a zero-level backup). This is easy :

<code>
rm ~/.tar
tar -g ~/.tar -zcvf /tmp/myarea_Date.tar.gz /home/myself
cd /tmp
ls -alFh myarea_Date.tar.gz
WriteCD myarea_Date.tar.gz
mount /mnt/cdrom/
diff /mnt/cdrom/myarea_Date.tar.gz ./myarea_Date.tar.gz

[if diff fails, your backup failed]

umount /mnt/cdrom/
rm myarea_Date.tar.gz
</code>

where 'myself' is your user name, 'Date' is the date (in the form 05Jun2005), and the /ls/ command is used to allow you to confirm that your tar file is less than 700 MB.

== Incremental backups ==

At the end of each working day, do an incremental backup :

<code>
tar -g ~/.tar -zcvf /tmp/Incremental_Date.tar.gz /home/myself
cd /tmp
ls -alFh Incremental_Date.tar.gz
WriteCD Incremental_Date.tar.gz
mount /mnt/cdrom/
diff /mnt/cdrom/Incremental_Date.tar.gz ./Incremental_Date.tar.gz
umount /mnt/cdrom/
rm Incremental_Date.tar.gz
</code>

Depending on how active (disk-wise) you've been, the incremental backups should be fairly small files (and you can fit plenty of them in one CD).

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