On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:57:28 +0000, r wrote:

One size does not fit all when making backups. What may work for me may
not work for you for a variety of reasons.

That said, one of the simplest backup techniques is to use a live CD and
an external hard drive. The external hard drive needs to have adequate
size to hold your backup images. The dramatic increase increase in storage
capacity over the past few years make them suitable to use to backup a
single pc, or even a small network. Your criteria calls for local storage,
but backing up one pc to another using a network is easy to setup, too.
A dedicated backup server is one of the first things to consider with
any netwrok, IMO. But external drives are a simple, mostly equivalent
option.

When making a backup this way, I use the tools listed below. Pick those
appropriate to meet your needs.

backup media: (hard drives, optical discs)
tools to obtain partition images: (tar, xfsdump, dd, ntfsclone)
tools for compressing the images: (gzip, bzip2)
tools for encrypting the backup: (device mapper containers, gpg messages)

Other information should be saved, also. I save the partition table
using something like ths:

# fdisk -l >fdisk.out

Then, I make a few notes which explain what was backed up and give some
simple hints to aid in any future restore operations. I usually make
a note of the current root-level password(s) for the system here. (This
is ok because my backups are saved in encrypted form.)

The live CD method is also a good platform to perform a restore. The
partition table recreated, the partition images restored, and the
bootloader fixed up. I use the the grub bootloader, BTW.

The "hard disk upgrade mini howto" is also a good place to learn about
what must be saved when making backups (or when moving to a new hard
drive). Practicing on a non-critical system is also a worthwhile exercise,
IMO.