Hi,
I'm about to start a regular backup schedule for my Linux system.
I need some pointers if I may
The system is *mainly* used as a personal home computer (it's actually a laptop running SuSE 9.2) although I do host some client material from it being a PHP developer.
I know that in an *ideal* situation I should have /home on a separate disk but being a laptop this isn't true in my case.
So what I basically have, is a laptop which is pretty much running 24/7, with a 30GB hard drive and a fair few user accounts on it.
Because *most* of the stuff isn't business critical I feel that a once weekly backup will suffice. I want to backup EVERYTHING, not just /home for example. The idea being, if my single hard disk fails (and being Dell I almost know it will at some point - I work with these things in my job all the time) I can restore the whole system from the most recent backup without all the hassle of doing a full system reinstall and then restoring /home.
Problems/Questions:
I don't have enough space on the HDD to duplicate everything (I have about 8GB free) during the backup process.
Do I make tar files before copying to another media or simply copy the files?
I only have a CD-R drive to backup too, whats the best way to handle this?
Important: Can I do this while the system is runnning X Desktop or do i need it to be read from a Live CD?
I'm basically looking for advice on doing a FULL weekly backup onto separate CD's. Thanks,
d11