[Discuss] Possible backup scenarios for a 500GB drive

[Alan W. Irwin]

I am just in the middle of purchasing a new system with a 500GB internal
hard drive, and I have heard that a good way to back up large internal
drives is with a large external hard drive. Such external hard drives are
relatively cheap these days (~$150 for a USB 2.0 500GB external hard drive
at atic.ca). One backup scenario I am thinking of is to periodically plug in
a USB external hard drive and run rsync to clone everything under / on the
internal drive to the external one.  Would that allow me to boot from
the external hard drive as a temporary measure if the internal hard drive
failed, and it was taking a while to replace it?

Another backup procedure which I know would work would be to use
dump/restore from a rescue distro such as RIP.  (I used that method in the
past to restore the club shuttles to a known state after they were loaned
out to club members for talks.) However, that method would not allow me to
boot during the time when the internal hard drive was being replaced, and
I am wondering if the rsync method would actually allow that?

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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