Making backups

In the other file, the one about connecting a CD Writer for cheaply making backups, I expressed the situation for a 2.4 (or older) kernel. It involved the ide-scsi device. The backup image was created with mkisofs and afterwards it was burned to disk with cdrecord.

This section explains about my current method, involving three homemade scripts (may be used with any kernel) and the script for recording the disk on this modern machine (Berylllium, qv).

The best thing to do, is to make a complete backup of the /home filesystem. But if you have a digital camera it is tempting to store at least some of the images in your home directory. And then it's not difficult to consume lots of space... Unfortunately, mkisofs has no way of leaving out files.

So there must be a better method than using mkisofs. And there is: good old tar. So I now make a tar file with the following command (named 'backup.home'):

      
#! /bin/sh

if (! rm /Backup/BeBackup.tar 2> /dev/null 1> /dev/null)  then
   echo No /Backup/BeBackup.tar file found.
fi
   
tar cf /Backup/BeBackup.tar /home 	\
		--exclude=Keep/* 	\
		--exclude=Cache/* 	\
		--exclude=jpg/*		\
		--exclude=Trash/*

This script makes a backup file called BeBackup since this machine is named Beryllium (Be, in short, for chemical engineers). The file is placed in the /Backup directory and must be run by a superuser. The nifty part here is as follows:

An XxBackup file is created in the root filesystem (in /Backup)
The contents of the backup are the full /home filesystem
If a filename has 'Keep/' in it, it is excluded
If a filename has 'Cache/' in it, it is excluded
If a filename has 'jpg/' in it, it is skipped

My /home/jan/Keep directory contains only aspects that need not be backupped. The 'Cache/' rule excludes the cache diskspace as used by most webbrowsers. These take up at least 50 MB per browser you use regularly. Also files in photo directories are omitted from the backup.
These EXCLUDE phrases can save you several hundred megabytes to backup.

This one is almost the same as the previous file (named MakeIso):

   mkisofs -R -L -D -o ../Diskimage.iso *

You just cd into the /Backup directory and then run 'MakeIso' as root user. It creates a diskimage of all backup files (possibly of several machines) and the image is stored in the root directory.

With a 2.6 kernel things are different but easier. Here is my current 'burnit' script:

   cdrecord speed=40 -v dev=ATAPI:0,1,0 fs=32M Diskimage.iso
   eject /cdrom

As will be clear, it needs to be run from the root directory.

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