Backing up my laptop

15 February 2008

To my surprise, my laptop has become my primary computer. With my old Fujitsu and my Macbook, I still made a remote connection to my desktop and worked there. However, with my Thinkpad, I have finally found a laptop that I am happy with, I think it is down to the quality of the keyboard. Working locally means I need to back the system up.

I have to admit that I put it off back-ups as I was waiting to find the time to learn a specialised backup program, which I still will learn soon. This week I decided that in the meantime, I will backup to an external drive that I had lying around.

I started by creating a new encrypted partition on the external device:

sudo cryptsetup luksFormat -c aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 /dev/sdb1

Read my recent series on encryption for more details on that.

Then I unlocked the partition:

sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 backup

Then I created a filesystem:

sudo mkfs.reiserfs /dev/mapper/backup

The next step was mounting the filesystem somewhere:

mount /dev/mapper/backup backup-disk

Then I headed over to the mountpoint:

cd backup-disk

Lastly, I copied my home directory here:

rsync -avzt /home/user ./

I saved a script that has some of the above commands (skip lines 1 and 3), rsync will only copy the changes, making the process very quick.

Discuss this post | Leave a comment

1 Dirk Gently says...

Nice to see some writing again! I was beginning to think you'd dun run off with that cute mid-eastern girl. ;)

I've always used tar for backup but after looking at your line, I discovered that rsync compresses too! Also I learned that rsync includes --exclude= just like tar and putting in --delete removes the destination file if has been removed from source. Who know I possibly will start using it.

Posted at 5:32 a.m. on February 17, 2008


2 Kewlmyst says...

Hmmm ... I have been rsync for a long time just to do back ups, but be aware that if you put the --delete option, and have a nice cron to do your backup, and you actually do a: rm -rf /home/kewlmyst/important_stuff/ and your little cron does it's job ... you have also lost your 'important stuff' on the backup. @dirk: the -z option compresses the network flow, but not the actual data strored on the remote location/disk.

Posted at 9:09 p.m. on June 12, 2008


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