[gentoo-user] Backups... a very general question...

[Steve [Gentoo]]

I've recently been thinking about backup strategy... following a painful
re-install after dropping a clanger during a kernel upgrade.  While this
seems a very basic topic, I can find surprisingly little documentation
about this on-line.

I need to address several entirely different kinds of backup:

1.   A backup of my root & boot partitions in a working state.  This
should be a backup to DVD-RW(s) - and would not contain any user-data...
but would provide a recovery point to get a working server as quickly as
possible in the event of a drive failure.  It would be fantastic if, in
addition to this. there were some means to track which packages had been
merged/updated since the backup was made - and a copy to be made of any
configuration changes... The list of updated packages (and the versions
to which they've been updated) and any changes to configuration files
would be tiny and hence easy to backup via another approach.  It would
be fantastic if the backup DVDs were bootable and doing so would restore
the backup.

2.  I've many gigabytes of MP3 files stored in Artist/[year]Album/*.*
hierarchy... which I extend sporadically.  I'd like a backup of this (as
organising it took lots of time) but a different approach is necessary
here... I'd like to pack as many whole albums onto DVDRs as would fit,
which I'd then number, and given a list detailing which albums are on
which DVDs, I could also play albums from a DVD player attached to a
hi-fi.  I'd like to be prompted to backup each time N-Mb of new data has
been added to my MP3 directory - and that the most recent DVD-R should
be authored with minimum user intervention.

3.  My home directory; subversion repositories and DBMS catalogues are
backed-up to a remote account.  I currently do this with a cron-job
which takes dumps; creates tar files; AES encrypts then uploads using
SSH to the remote site... which manages a history of 3 backups using a
simple shell-script.  This works OK, but it is very ad-hoc... and it
won't scale as every backup requires that I upload a new copy - even if
I've only made a trivial change to my data.  It would be far better if
an incremental update were possible - though I'm not willing to give up
encryption of data I send off-site.

Are there any packages which would make any (or all) of these tasks more
straightforward or more efficient?


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