Thanks to everyone that responded to my earlier thread (Need backup hardware
suggestions). Driven by price, and by the knowledge that things that are
harder to do usually do not get done regularly, I have purchased an Iomega
HDD 80 GB with USB 2.0. Tape drives require manual intervention while I
could presumably just set up a cron job to periodically back up stuff to
the HD. It cost me $119 (buy.com) and thus was far cheaper than even used
decent tape hardware (I found no prices lower than about $250).

Now I have a few questions :

1. To maximize speed of backup, which filesystem should I use for formatting
the new HD (btw. how do I do it ?) ? ResierFS or ext2 or something else. I
have read that ReiserFS is better for large backups.

2. What would be a good tool to use ? Amanda or just a custom script that
backs up the stuff after bzip2'ing the stuff ? I have to backup two machines
- one with 80 GB max HD (actual usage is less than 40 GB) and another which
is 40 GB max HD (actual usage is less than 25 GB).

"Madhusudan Singh" <spammers-go-here@spam.invalid> wrote in message
news:2rg27nF19l66uU1@uni-berlin.de...
> Thanks to everyone that responded to my earlier thread (Need backup
hardware
> suggestions). Driven by price, and by the knowledge that things that are
> harder to do usually do not get done regularly, I have purchased an Iomega
> HDD 80 GB with USB 2.0. Tape drives require manual intervention while I
> could presumably just set up a cron job to periodically back up stuff to
> the HD. It cost me $119 (buy.com) and thus was far cheaper than even used
> decent tape hardware (I found no prices lower than about $250).
>
> Now I have a few questions :
>
> 1. To maximize speed of backup, which filesystem should I use for
formatting
> the new HD (btw. how do I do it ?) ? ResierFS or ext2 or something else. I
> have read that ReiserFS is better for large backups.
>

I believe that ReiserFS is the fastest when dealing with many small files.
But then again, some people believe the earth is flat. There are plenty of
benchmarks on the net giving a wide variety of results - I suspect there
will be little real difference.


> 2. What would be a good tool to use ? Amanda or just a custom script that
> backs up the stuff after bzip2'ing the stuff ? I have to backup two
machines
> - one with 80 GB max HD (actual usage is less than 40 GB) and another
which
> is 40 GB max HD (actual usage is less than 25 GB).

Look at rsync (google searchs for rysnc backups will get you more
information than I can give you). That way you copy over data that has
changed, and not data that stays the same. There are some cunning tricks
that can be played with cp to give you virtual snapshots of old backups.

I missed out on the beginning of this thread, but if you are looking for
safe backups and have access to more than one network connected by
broadband, you could look at rsync to backup over the net. It's a lot less
hassle to run automatically overnight than moving backing up to a physical
medium and having to put it in a safe or whatever.