On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 03:01:09PM +0100, Bryn M. Reeves wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On 05/31/2012 02:35 PM, Jeff Gipson wrote: > > On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 12:15:58PM +0100, Paul Smith wrote: > >> Dear All, > >> > >> I have got a new external hard disk, which I would like to use as > >> a mirror of my home directory (for backup purpose). What format > >> for the external disk filesystem do you recommend? And what the > >> proper command to accomplish the formatting? > >> > > > > ### End of Message from Paul Smith ### > > > > For best advice, more information would be helpful... For example, > > what's your retention policy? If you only need a single backup, > > and not historical backups *and* you are using LVM, you might > > consider just storing LVM snaphots on the backup drive. If you want > > a more flexible solution, you might try using rsync. Tar and dump > > are also still used. > > That would mean you would need to add the external disk to the system > VG (in order to be able to snapshot logical volumes from the system). > > Generally that's a bad idea: if you're spreading VGs over multiple > devices, especially with snapshotting, you typically want redundancy > below the VG (i.e. mirrored or RAIDed PVs). You could also use LVM > mirroring but then you're adding more complexity to the configuration. > > Things can also get ugly here if the backup disk is not going to be > present at all times (for one thing if you do ever add one to your > system VG you'll probably need to update the initramfs to ensure it > contains the required modules for the external device). > That's a good point. I guess now would be a good time to mention that a volume snapshot != backup (see below), however, I've heard of snapshots sometimes being used to create a "still" or "point-in-time" copy of the system, which itself is backed up, since backups can take a considerable amount of time. > > As far as your specific question, you need the name of the device, > > and I recommend creating a UDEV rule so that every time you plug in > > the external hard drivei, the partition you backup to gets the SAME > > link in /dev. This can save you from accidentally backing up to a > > thumbdrive that was also in the USB port, or maybe a different hard > > drive. Let's > > You can also just set a label on it - udisks and the modern desktop > environments will then mount it under the media directory with a name > based on the label and this will propagate to other systems you may > use the device on without the need to copy rules files around the place. Labels are okay, but I dislike them because they are abitrary. If labels are used, then don't used a label like "backups" because it's too likely to have a naming collision. Use a label like "red-rover red-rover" which is less likely to have collisions. As far as using an external drive is concerned, for my backups, I opted not to do this, because when my house burns or gets blown away by a tornado, or is robbed (in which case the burgler is likely to take everything attached to the computer, too) that on-site backup isn't going to help very much; but the question was just about formatting a drive. -- ×-×-×-×-×-×-×-×-×-×-× Jeffrey A. Gipson ×-×-×-×-×-×-×-×-×-×-× -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
