Backups And External Drives

Hello everyone,

I recently had an issue where I lost my whole backup server due to an electrical overload causing my server to literally explode and fried all 4 of my terabyte drives.... needless to say, I have no more backups because of this, and everywhere I read about backups said that setting up a raid array would allow me to keep good backups.... boy did I learn this lesson the hard way in needing to have some sort of external backup option, which brings me to this post and my questions:

I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server on an older Dell Poweredge 600sc, and I was thinking of using WD Passport 1Tb external drives to be used as my "offsite" backup option. I don't have a lot of data, and my current backup schedule is only a weekly backup, so thinking that if I have two of these passport drives so that I can have one drive offsite and one attached to the server, and rotate them every 4 weeks so as not to loose all my data.

Here's my question: Ideally, I would love to just be able to unplug the current drive, plug in the new drive and have everything work. However, I don't see this actually working, but if there's a way to do this, that would be totally awesome.... ;-)

So, realistically, I know I will have to unmount the one drive, unplug it, then plug in the new drive and mount it on the system. Is there a way to mount this to the same mount point automatically so that I don't have to rewrite my backup script each time I swap drives out so that the backups go to the same mount point? Or will the UUID's get messed up each time I do this?

Hopefully this makes sense and an easy solution can be found to accomodate this idea.....

Thanks again for all your help. This site is awesome for newbies such as myself........

Mikey


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Need Help Understanding Luckybackup

gold finger was kind enough to share this with me a while ago:

Quote:
Do backups to either another HDD, partition, or a USB stick (if big enough to hold your data). Can use program to make an initial backup of /home/gregory; then use it to periodically update that backup by having it sync between your installed Xubuntu /home/gregory and the backup copy. The sync function will just copy over things that are new or changed, rather than copying everything all over again.

Assuming your Xubuntu filesystem is Ext4, example of doing initial backup would be something like this:

* Spare USB with large partition formatted as Ext4 and labeled "BACKUPS"
* Open luckybackup and choose "Backup" function
* "Source" = /home/gregory
* "Destination" = /media/gregory/BACKUPS (might be under /media/BACKUPS)
* Check box to not create new directories (it will just do exact copy of source)


After initial backup, either make a new task for syncing, or modify the backup task to turn it into a syncing task instead. Then use that periodically to update the backed-up /home/gregory.
I've downloaded Luckybackup and have been experimenting with it but I'm still not sure the best way to go about using it as a backup. Like in gold finger's advice, why would I check the box to not create new directories? It seems to me doing it without checking the box re-creates things just the way they are on my computer. When I check the box it just takes everything out of the folders. Seems confusing (and unnecessasry). And I have a really hard time finding the errors after a run and when I do find them I do I don't know what they mean. And so if I backup the source destination it makes an exact copy on my destination drive (with folders if I don't check the box, without if I do). Then if I do that as an ongoing thing, I will be backing up all my data with each run (which I'm assuming would be much more time consuming), whereas if I choose 'syncrhonize source and destination' it will only backup the changes in my source and usb drive (which would be my destination drive)?

Is that the idea?

And I noticed that Lucky did not want to transfer things with colons in them. Googling around somebody said that problem would be taken care of by switching to ext 3 or ext 4 for formatting the destination drive (as gold finger suggested). Is this a good idea? (I've always felt comfortabel with FAT because if I needed to plug my flash drive into Microsoft it would work (as well as with Linux).)

So the first time I use Lucky I choose "backup source inside destination" and of course the source and destination. Should I check the "Do NOT create extra directory" box? (Again, that seems off as 95% of what I'll be backing up is in folders.)

Then after I've done that, I choose the snyc option?

A lot of stuff. I know. Thanks.

PS. As a slight complication I have the data (basically the "home" folder) of my two computers (work and home) synced via Copy.com.

Do I Have To Use EXT 4 Instead Of FAT32 Formatting For Backups Using Luckybackup?

(BTW I'm running Xubuntu 15.04)

I'm starting to understand Luckybackup. And gold_finger said:

Quote:
Assuming your Xubuntu filesystem is Ext4, example of doing initial backup would be something like this:

* Spare USB with large partition formatted as Ext4 and labeled "BACKUPS"
I know the EXT4 is more friendly to Linux but all my flash drives are FAT32 (and I'll be backing up to those flash drives) and I'd really like to keep them that way (because sometimes I do plug them into Windows machines--and I know FAT32 works with both Windows and Linux). So is there any reason I would have to use Ext4 and not FAT32 in backing up stuff in LuckyBackup?

I confess to great ignorance about the difference between the EXT and FAT formats. Like if I do format a flash drive to EXT 4 and want to plug the flash drive into a Windows computer it just doesn't work? Like, what's the advantage to using EXT4 then if FAT 32 works with Linux and Windows? What are the disadvantages to using EXT4?

Thanks.

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About a week or so ago i was asked to have a look at a mate of mine's Company Server that had crashed after a power failure - no ups and close to 9GB data with no backup.
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This is about the extent of my knowledge base when it comes to Linux, and again i don't know that i'd want to risk it with no backup of the data.

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Hi, all, I am new to the forum and quite new to Linux, I am running Mint and Kali from a USB drive, all is going well with with the software and I am starting to find my way around it.

So, now to my question, I have 15 machines which all run from a CF card and the card has multiple partitions and is a Windows Embedded XP, not that the operating system makes any difference, I need to upgrade all the CF cards from 2gb to 4gb, so unfortunately Windows isn't an option to use to copy the drives as it doesn't recognise multiple partitions on a removable drive, so I cant just remove the drive, clone it and fit the new one.

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so, what i am trying to do it copy my hard drive from saturn server: /dev/sda1 over SSH to my backup server skyline.

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