UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello forum, this is my first post here and i have some questions:

Some info about what kind of back up i want to make:

I would like to backup /home/lambda/projects and some config files in /home and /etc and a whole hard disc(music,photos,videos etc).

Since i want it to run it every Monday, i understand i must use cron, but i also want if for any reason on Monday 01:00 :

a)Hard disk(the one i want to take back up of) is not mounted, inform me with mail(1) so that i can mount it.

b)If computer is turned off, on next boot inform me with mail(1) that i have not made a backup that Monday.(by reading a log file of successful backups on boot)

c)If for any reason the back up was interrupted(reboot, electricity blackout), inform me again with mail(1).

d)If the backup was successful write to a log file that day-month-year-time that back up was successful and inform me with mail(1).

Since i also want to backup config files, this means that the filename is the same, but the content of the file might change.Or for example i might add some new photos to a file so the back up should be updated with the new photos. Some kind of synchronization that is.

1) Which are the best practices/tools for such backups(if there's a book/link for example)?

2) In terms of time, except for the size of the files, which other parameters matter for the duration of the backup?

Rsync is an excellent tool for incremental backups. There are many good tutorials out there, and, of course man pages.
rsnapshot is great for doing snapshots (e.g. hourly, daily and monthly). It uses rsync and is pretty easy to configure.
To check whether a disk (or other device) is mounted, grep your /etc/mtab (assuming you are on linux).

Hello and thank you for your reply.

I'm on openbsd but checking if the disk is mounted is not a problem.

Do you use rsnapshot? Are you happy with it's features?

I do use it, and am very happy with it. It uses hard links, so it saves disk space and it's easy to configure. Apart from that, it wraps around rsync, as I mentioned above, so you can pass on rsync arguments and customize on a detailed level.