Advice

Back up your data!!!

Home user:

Write or acquire a script that copies it off onto another machine.

Enterprise server:

Buy a tape drive and consider using a good commercial backup program or writing some really good scripts.

(P.S. Back up your data!) Otherwise you might end up like this guy (warning: contains bad words).

Tools

If you are looking for commercial dedicated backup tools, take a look at Arkeia and BackupExec.

For homegrown solutions, you can use tar(1) or rsync(1). The latter is particularly interesting as it can synch directory trees with minimal I/O. To copy to another machine/partition etc you can do rsync -av --rsh="ssh" sourcedir destdir. Other options you might like to consider on rsync(1) command line are -l which keeps symlinks intact, -z which compresses the data (useful over slow links), and --delete which deletes files which exist on the destination but not the source (use with caution!!)

rsync(1) has also been used as the basis for a number of Free tools, such as the excellent rsnapshot, which lets you keep multiple backups at only slightly more space usage than a single day by keeping only one copy of files unchanged across backups. Another rsync(1)-based tool is rdiff-backup(1)?, a Python program based on rdiff(1)?.

See also

• TarNotes for information on backing up large amounts of data to more than one tape with tar(1)
• ArkeiaNotes
• BackupExecNotes
• Linux Ext2fs Undeletion mini-HOWTO (although you don't need to since you have good backups, right?)

CategoryDiskNotes