Backing up data

[Shannon]

I only do a whole disk backup about once every... oh... whenever my Spidey Senses tell me the disk is about to die. This one is currently on attempt #3. (#1 died thanks to Android sucking so hard that it brought down my entire linux system when it decided to reboot my phone spontaneously. #2 was taking forever, so I stopped it and removed the pipe to gzip. Now I'm finding that attempt number 3 has a poor choice of block sizes based on a post I read from someone who didn't know what they were talking about, which is allowing me to keep the system usably responsive, but not copying data very quickly. Meanwhile I can only surf the web, as I'm backing up a live filesystem...

My usual is to just copy my /home partition to one of my archive externals, but I also have Windows 7 installed on the second partition of this disk, and if the disk goes, I don't want to lose it. So... whole disk backup, followed by partition specific backups. There are probably faster ways to go, but it's simple. rsync and rsnapshot have in common - and correct me if I'm wrong - the r standing for "remote", as in network required. That's a downfall for me. I'd look it up but my eyes are crossing at this point.