It's been my intention for a while to make a proper back-up of my files. I have used various methods such as CD-R, DVD-R, external hard drives (various sizes) and even copying to a remote server, but some files were too big for these. So I bought myself a new Maxtor 320GB USB drive. That's bigger than my combined existing drives. I chose this one based on it being the cheapest large drive in PC World and I happened to have vouchers to spend there. It's nothing exciting to look at, just a large blob with some cables, but it at least runs nice and quiet.

I haven't quite achieved my back-up aims due to a couple of issues. Firstly, the drive is formatted as NTFS. It seems that this is supported on Linux these days thanks to the NTFS-3G project. I installed that and can indeed read and write to the drive. The next problem was that I could not copy files with certain characters in the names. It was suggested on the LUG IRC channel that I set the locale for the drive to something using UTF8. I added a line to my fstab, but the drive was being mounted from settings elsewhere and not using that. By unmounting it and re-mounting with a different location I was able to resolve that for now. So now I can copy my files, but Konqueror complains about not being able to copy certain attributes. I'm not so worried about that as long as the files are copied. I would like to set up a script to do incremental backups, but have had problems with both rsync and rdiff-backup. I think these could also be related to the destination filing system not having the same capabilities as what is used in *nix.

There are some alternatives to explore. I could create a tar file (makes it trickier to get files back out) or re-format the drive. I need to be sure that the latter will not break anything. I had another drive caddy that would only detect drives formatted in FAT32. I'll concentrate on just getting the files copied for now.

I'm open to suggestions on how to back up efficiently. Feel free to leave comments here.

The LUG meeting last week was a bit quiet. Only five of us, so we just chatted. I expect others are on their holidays at the moment.