Three strategies for better backups
Data Protection
Image © icetray, 123RF.com
To protect your data, you need to do more than schedule regular backups. Here are three often overlooked strategies that can help make your backups more accessible, secure, and reliable.
From rsync and rsnapshot to Bacula and Déjà Dup, Linux has no shortage of backup applications. You can even find basic suggestions for a backup strategy such as Ubuntu’s, which include such basics as storing at least one backup off-site. However, these suggestions are usually incomplete and occasionally misleading. As my own backup strategies have evolved, I have found three strategic considerations that are often neglected but can greatly affect a backup’s accessibility, security, and reliability.
Choose an Appropriate Filesystem
Most external drives come with NTFS or exFAT filesystems, so the users of recent Linux distributions can use them out of the box. However, thanks to parted and its desktop counterparts, reformatting an external drive takes only a few minutes, and users have no shortage of filesystems to choose from (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The default filesystems available for example, in KDE Partition Manager.
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