Backup advice

[Howard Goldstein]

Jason Lixfeld wrote:
> - Other folks dumping to a hard drive at night?  Care to share any of 
> your experiences/rationale?

Not with dump/restore.  After using amanda and a tape drive for eons I'm 
now happy with a bacula solution to backup 2 freebsds and a windows 
machine.  It does incrementals except on Saturday night when it 
alternates between a differential (sort of a mass incremental from the 
last full) and a full backup to a cheap IDE drive.  Every Sunday I copy 
the IDE drive to a USB drive and take it offsite and bring back another 
one.

After restoring from scratch - power supply frying the entire RAID array 
  on my desktop -STABLE machine - I think the advantages of dump are 
certainly there but for my apps, where I don't have any huge sparse 
files or a lot of hard links other than whatever gets installed with a 
fresh install (if anything) to worry about - they're outweighed by the 
convenience of bacula where I can go back to a point in time.  YMMV...