“Everyone has a backup plan. Unfortunately, most of us use
the “No Backup” plan….“
“For the home network, you have to have some sort of backup
plan. Although hard drives will crash, the real value in the
backups is restoring accidentally deleted, or changed, files.
Sooner or later you will delete, or change, something important,
and without a backup, you could render your computer unbootable. I
am embarrassed to admit this, but I actually deleted /root on one
occasion. Note: backups should be considered compromised if you
have been cracked. Backup plans need to be simple to implement or
they will not get done – especially at home. A backup plan for home
should cover two areas: how much are you going to backup, and how
are you going to do it with the least amount of effort.”
“How much to backup: I try to minimize the amount I backup
because storage space costs money. I only backup directories, not
the entire file system. Most of /usr and /opt are on the install
cdrom, so if the hard drive crashes, I will install them by default
with a new install. /etc and /home are the most important as they
contain the configuration and custom settings files. Your backup
plan should include full backups of the selected directories every
so often, and then backup just the changes (incremental backups)
daily.”