Backup is backup. Always keep your original data!

I asked an external harddisk to my company, and they bought me a 120Gb Maxtor OneTouch Mini. I intended to use it as a backup media for my work. I partitioned it into 4 partitions, 1Gb FAT32 for Slax, 40GB EXT3 for projects, data, and utilities, 40GB EXT3 for less important data, 38GB FAT32 for use with Windows systems.

Actually, I was thinking to use it as my main storage for my datas. I thought that because I’m working partly on plant, and partly in the office, I need something I can carry so I can work anywhere. And at the time, I lend my laptop to my sister. So I thought that an external harddisk would be sufficient for me.

So I copied all of my files to it, and I reformated my PC’s harddisk to install Ubuntu Hardy Heron. I forgot to copy my datas back to my PC, and long time after that: today, the partition in which I stored my most important data is broken. “A disaster brother… Disaster… “

At first, I thought it was only filesystem corruption or bad sectors so that I could fix it with e2fs tools and badblock. But I was wrong. It seems that the disk is broken physically. The kernel sends “Buffer I/O error on device /dev/sd5, logical block x” messages.

Now I’m waiting for miracle for my harddisk…

The moral of the story is: Backup is backup. The external harddisk is designed to be a backup media, not to be used as main data storage. I was using it as my main data storage, so when it breaks… my heart breaks!

Full dan Incremental Backup dengan tar

Untuk melakukan full backup, seperti biasa saja:

tar -zcf $BACKUPNAME.tar.gz -C $DATADIR data

Perintah tersebut akan menghasilkan file .tar.gz berisi direktori data dari $DATADIR.

Sedangkan untuk incremental backup, digunakan parameter –newer seperti berikut:

tar --newer "$LASTBACKUP" -zcf $BACKUPNAME.tar.gz -C $DATADIR data

Perintah tersebut juga menghasilkan file .tar.gz berisi direktori data dari $DATADIR, tetapi hanya berisi file-file dengan tanggal yang lebih dari $LASTBACKUP. $LASTBACKUP adalah tanggal dengan format tertentu. Untuk melihat format penulisan tanggal yang diterima oleh tar, lihat di http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/tar/tar_100.html. Kalau saya hanya menggunakan format yyyymmdd.