Chapter 7. Backups

There are so many enemies of your data. When it comes to disks, it’s not a question of whether your hard drives will fail, it’s a question of when. Beyond hard drive failure you find rm, dd, and a number of other Linux commands that are incredibly efficient at destroying your data. Just ask a good friend of mine who was trying to clean up his MP3 directory. A number of us were helping him perfect a find script that would delete all of the files in his MP3 directory that did not end in .mp3. Despite our warnings to test the script with echo first, he ran the full command: find . -type f ! -name '*.mp3' -exec rm -f {} \;. At first it appeared to be working, until he discovered he hadn’t run the command in his MP3 directory—he ran it in ~, his home directory. True, he had cleaned up his MP3 directory, along with the rest of his files. The bottom line is that the only real way to ensure that your data is safe is to back it up.

There are any number of ways to back up data under Ubuntu, and in this chapter I cover a graphical tool called BackupPC. I also discuss some commonsense backup tips and describe how to create a full image of a drive or partition. I include some special considerations for when you’re backing up a database. By the end of the chapter, if you haven’t set up a backup system yet, I hope you will be encouraged by how easy it is under Ubuntu.