Re: Need advice re crash protection

forceten32 wrote:

I have a small business and use a notebook constantly. I also have a
desktop but I use it very little (I'm hndicapped and it's somewhat
difficult to access.) Anyway, I was fooling myself that the desktop was
a backtop but it's way data-outdated now. And it suddenly occurred to me
that if my laptop crashes, I'm in trouble.

Yup, though for best results, you would have made a backup right after
installing Windows, the latest patches and all your software and their
patches in case you do need to reinstall.

I have around 15G total data, including programs, on the laptop. Am I
right in supposing an external drive would do the trick? And what should
I back up?

Since you're concerned about the state of your computer, only back up data
files you need to save. Do not back up programs or the OS (when you
reinstall the OS, you'll need to reinstall the programs to get them to work
anyway, so no point backing 'em up).

All bytes on the current hard drive i.e. a mirror of the
entire drive?

That would be a good way to back up a fresh install once everything's
installed and patched properly as a baseline backup seperate from your
daily/weekly incremental.

Is that practical?

Not with Windows tools. There's proprietary payware like Norton Ghost out
there, but in the end it's just an expensive way of using Knoppix's dd
command:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/path/to/backup (this makes a bit for bit copy of the
drive at /dev/hda in the file /path/to/backup)

dd if=/path/to/backup of=/dev/hda (this dumps the backup at /path/to/backup
back onto /dev/hda overwriting all existing data)

Note this works for the entire disk. If you want a specific partition on
HDA, you'll need to know it's number and use /dev/hda1 (or whatever)
instead. Device naming explained at
<http://www.linux.com/howtos/Partition/devices.shtml>.

Is there a way, I can program to plug in the external drive every so often
and it will automatically update what is changed?

Seagate ships software with their external drives that allow you to press
the "Backup" button on the drive to make a new backup as predefined in
their software; this is the closest I can think of to what you're asking
for in Windows. (Debian has faubackup which does exactly what you're
talking about and takes about 90 seconds to install and set up)

Or do I just move file by file like copying to a floppy?

You'll lose some metadata (namely the permissions, datestamps, probably the
owning user and group as well) by doing it this way, but if all you care
about is the content and not the metadata, then it doesn't matter.


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