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Having just suffered a HDD failure, resulting in the loss of all data on the machine, my mind has been wonderfully concentrated in once more getting involved in auto backups. . Back in the early days, with mandrake, I did use the backup function. But, and it was a big but. In those days hard drives were small and costly, and doing a full backup every week and incrementals in between soon filled up the disc. Nowadays, huge drives are tge norm and are cheap. But what to use. I'd like a system with a GUI, and simple to setup and use, A look round reveals systems for which absolutely no information seems to be available. Any ideas, anyone. Simple, neat and clear. In the old days, when I had to work for a living, I had to do backups on our systems. It was frightening to watch as the sheer volume of tape cassettes built up. When the day finally came, when we were asked to restore a file, we spent three days at it, finally giving up when it dawned on us that it was costing more to get the file back, than creating the thing again.

Hi!

For the /home partition I use rsync for backup to a usb-hdd. For the system I use Redobackup

http://www.redobackup.org

It's a Ubuntu based live-cd, especially for backup purposes. Works great and I use it since Mageia 1.

cheers,
Bernd

A few weeks ago, I lost two hard drives back to back.

The first one to fail died on Tuesday. It contained the hot backup of my system. I shrugged...I had been planning to replace that old SCSI subsystem with SSDs anyway. So I ordered an SSD. The SSD arrived Thursday, and I promptly powered down the workstation and plugged the SSD in, intending to scroll the contents of three SCSI drives onto it, then remove those three drives. I would scroll the backup of the drive that failed onto the SSD, though much of that drive WAS backups.

I restarted the workstation, and the system hard drive spun up, but then refused to be recognized.

Thus, I had lost my system AND my hot backup of my system.

So, I changed my plans, and turned the SSD into a system drive...loading the system from my SECOND hot backup of the system, which is on my NAS. Total time to fully recover the system, with a new 500 GB SSD? About 4 hours.

I then said: "it's time". I ordered another SSD and, when it arrived, I completely removed the SCSI subsystem. I lost no data at all, from a double hard drive failure because my backup system is automatic, reliable, and simple to use.

It doesn't have a gui, though.

viewtopic.php?f=41&t=5957

Thanks for the comments.Since posting the original, I've done some more poking about. So far, Ithe best I've come up with, which is a Mageia available system, is "Back in Time", which, on the face of it, seems to do the trick. It's clean, neat and simple and sets out the options in a clear fashion. I've a spare 500Mb drive on the machine, doing nothing, so I've installed Back in Time and set it up to do daily backups to see how it goes. If it lives up to the promiise, I'll install a larger drive, and see how it goes, longer term. Has anyone used this facility, with experience of its possible shortcomings and good points?