[PLUG] Backups <again>

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Sun Nov 11 02:02:16 UTC 2007


On Sat, 10 Nov 2007 09:16:24 -0800
"Ali Corbin" <ali.corbin at gmail.com> dijo:

> On Nov 9, 2007 9:42 PM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> ...
> > My backup requirements are not the same as most Linux users. I create new data that I don't want to lose maybe once a week, sometimes less often.
> ___________________
> 
> I have similar needs.
> That's on my old computer.  I just bought a replacement, and am
> seriously considering _not_ moving the backup cartridge to it.  I was
> thinking of buying an external usb drive to use for a backup instead.
> But now I'm wondering if a flash drive might be good enough for my
> needs.

I have a couple USB drives that I could use for backups. The problem is
that there is an obscure bug in the Linux USB protocol that causes
nasty things to happen when transferring very large amounts of data. I
can move individual files of any size, but when I use rsync, cp, tar,
or anything else that is going to move 16 GB of data over the USB port
it locks up the computer about two out of three times. Sometimes it
will lock up within a few minutes after starting the copy, sometimes it
gets almost all the way to the end. Occasionally it even completes the
copy. As I understand it the problem is in the way the USB protocol
works on Linux. Keith told me about it once, but I don't remember
exactly what caused the problem. I also don't know if it might have
been fixed.

Today I experimented with NSsbackup, a fork of Simple Backup that was
created in 2005 and added in the release of Dapper. It has the same
problems that Simple Backup has - it can't find any target folders for
where to put the backup  and there is a Save button to save the
configuration changes you made, but it doesn't work. You have to edit
the config file manually, but that does no good because it ignores half
the settings in its own config file. Plus you can have only one config
file, so you can't create a configuration for your monthly, another for
your weekly, another for an incremental, and so on. You have to edit the
configurations every time. And it can't even do an incremental. And you
can't tell it to limit the size of the archives to < 4 GB so they could
be manually burned to a DVD. (Groisofs can't handle a file greater than
4 GB.) Pretty hopeless.

I think I'd be just as well off to fire up K3B, drag files into its
Burn window until the window is full, and tell it to burn them.



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