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You'd need to install something like 7zip to extract the tarball, and it'd take a long time, but you could do it.
How long are we talking? For ~200+ GBs, hours, days? My window machine is a core2 duo e8600 running at 3.33 GHz with 3.25 GB RAM.
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Except it doesn't look quite so easy now since your system can't understand XFS. You'd have to reformat the drive as something else,
I think the drive comes XFS base, reformatting to another format shouldn't be too difficult. What would you suggest, NTFS? Based upon the output of the $ cat /proc/filesystems command, the system doesn't support NTFS either. Would NTFS still allow the tarball to be read by windows in a pinch?
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or install XFS drivers. It's possible you already have them, just haven't loaded them yet -- try modprobe xfs.
Does this command just see if they are there or load them if they are? Is this safe, stability wise? I don't want to make changes that jeopardize the safety of the data prior to having it backed up...
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(The offline backup doesn't care what's on the USB drive -- it overwrites it all raw.)
By that do you mean it doesn't care what files are on the drive or what format it is, or both?
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You could even keep the backup "fresh" in a similar way to the online backup, once you have it, since almost nothing but user files are going to change.
So what you're saying is, I would make a mirror of the entire system hard drive, and then weekly, could do backups, more similar to the online style, where I just upload file changes?
This would be opposed to downloading a tarball onto the drive, and then moving forward downloading new tarfiles on a weekly basis?
Choosing between these options should all be kept in the context that, at some point, I am going to ideally be installing the RAID 1 backup to do nightly backups. At that point, the external drive will be either kept in a separate location in the office or as you have suggested kept off-site (if possible) and brought in to do weekly backups.
When I do install the RAID system, is it better to have them simply backup data files or for them to act as a mirrored system? Planning ahead could help determine what should be done now.
Finally, if I really wanted to, could I do both? Would there be any advantage? disadvantage?
Thanks!