[tlug] Backup strategy

[David Riggs <dariggs@example.com>]

In response to recent comments to Joe, I though I would suggest a bare 
bones simple backup strategy that I have been following using nothing 
but the below two  tar commands (which I have in my ~/bin directory). 
For personal use to back up ones own data, it seems to me quite adequate 
and can hardly be simpler, always a virture, I think.

Once in a great while I make a CD of all my user data, and once a week 
back up everything that has changed since then to my flash memory card 
in the pci slot. (excluding the Trash dir of KDE and other things 
useless files with the --exclude's)

So every Monday I run "backall todays.date"

#!/bin/bash
tar czvf "/flash/$1" --newer-mtime=2005/03/09 --exclude='*.Trash*' \
--exclude='/xp/archive*'  --exclude='*~' --exclude='*#'  /xp


Then every day I run the below which backs up (in a second or two) 
everything changed since Monday: "daily tues" changing the argument to 
whatever day of the week it is. This avoids having a pile of old daily 
backups since it just overwrites last week's.

#!/bin/bash
echo "backing up to filename /flash/$1"
tar czf /flash/$1 -N 'last mon' --exclude='*.Trash*' --exclude='*#' \
--exclude='/xp/archive.unchanging.data/*' --exclude='*~'  /xp

Many things could of course be done to grab the date automatically and 
all, but I kind of like forcing myself to think for half a second.

David Riggs,
Kyoto