Poll: Which backup program do you use?

[Chaotic42]

I got into a discussion on another forum about backups. I backed up my ~60GB of data using tar and gzip. He said he would have used Norton Ghost, which I don't have. To me, tar and gzip are just as good if not better, and they came free with Debian.

He also thinks I'm taking a risk using gzip.

So what do you guys think? I'm not trying to slam him down or anything, he could be right, but the way I look at it:

1. tar and gzip are staples of the community.
2. Thousands (if not more) of people use them everyday.
3. A tar.gz file is readable by just about every computer.
4. tar and gzip is free.

So what do you think? How do you back up your stuff?

 

[n0cmonkey]

I go with tar.gz. There are plenty of programs to open the files. It's a standard. .zip is the standard for wintel, .Z was the old standard for unix, and now .gz is the standard. Maybe someday it will be bzip2, but I doubt it. I'll be learning how to use my DVD burner as soon as I get 4GB worth of data to backup on the winders machine.

What kind of risks did he mention?

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
I go with tar.gz. There are plenty of programs to open the files. It's a standard. .zip is the standard for wintel, .Z was the old standard for unix, and now .gz is the standard. Maybe someday it will be bzip2, but I doubt it. I'll be learning how to use my DVD burner as soon as I get 4GB worth of data to backup on the winders machine.

What kind of risks did he mention?

Data corruption with gzip.

I may have only been in the *nix comminity for 7 years, but I've never seen a corrupt gzip file.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
I go with tar.gz. There are plenty of programs to open the files. It's a standard. .zip is the standard for wintel, .Z was the old standard for unix, and now .gz is the standard. Maybe someday it will be bzip2, but I doubt it. I'll be learning how to use my DVD burner as soon as I get 4GB worth of data to backup on the winders machine.

What kind of risks did he mention?

Data corruption with gzip.

I may have only been in the *nix comminity for 7 years, but I've never seen a corrupt gzip file.

I've never seen one I would blame on gzip.

 

[sciencewhiz]

will a couple of bit errors in a gzipped file cause you to lose the whole thing? Could he be thinking of that (whether or not it's true)?

 

[mikecel79]

I have seen a corrupt tar.gz file but I can't say if it was caused by gzip or not. Ghost works fine for doing the whole machine or a partition but you have to reboot the machine to use Ghost. Your method is much better. There are entire backup programs built on using gz, I wouldn't worry about it. If I used *nix more I would be using gz for sure to do backups.

 

[Need4Speed]

i use rsync and ssh in a mixed windows and linux environemt.

http://www.cyberfrogs.net/rsync.php

 

[aspitzer]

amanda
http://www.amanda.org

you can also set this up to do incremental backups do disk (i.e. 3TB of IDE drive...) as well as tape.

 

[Nothinman]

Data corruption with gzip.

I may have only been in the *nix comminity for 7 years, but I've never seen a corrupt gzip file.

You have the exact same chances of corruption with Ghost.

 

[pitupepito2000]

I personally like to just copy files over to a CD. I know that using Bzip2 would help a lot specially with text files. But I don't want to take the chance of compressing something and then loossing all the files. For example if one of the files that you are compressing is corrupted or gets corrupted then all the files in the archive would also get corrupted because the program wouldn't be able to uncompress them all.