Best Place & Way to Back Up Files Stored Exclusively on External Drive

I have an 8 TB external hard disk named Draco that I use to store nearly all my files, but this is kind of stupid of me because I don't have any place to back things up. Do I have to buy another one in order to back it up, or are there more efficient/smarter ways to back up the files?

I can't find my root in the disk utility so I don't know how much disk space is on the location where root is stored (pardon the poor grammar), but I know I have an internal traditional (non-solid state) 2 TB drive available and mostly empty. I'm not sure how large my files come to, the ones on Draco, but they are likely > 2 TB, if I recall correctly.

I understand that rsync + cron would be the most efficient linux-type way to schedule regular backups, in that rsync only updates the file differences and thus is optimized for speed/performance, while cron as we know is very reliable for scheduling tasks temporally-periodically. Now the issue is just to figure out where the target backup location would be for rsync and cron to run their magic.

Any contributions or thoughts are appreciated.

Michael

The simple things to say are -

• You are right to be thinking about this - backups are essential.
• Obviously if you are trying to back up >2GB of data, and you only have a 2 GB internal drive available, you’ll need to get hold of a larger drive for backup.

You could in theory back your data up on the 8GB external drive you already have (ie 2 copies of your data in that drive), if you are using less than 4GB of it. I’m not convinced that’s a good backup though as it won’t prevent data loss due to physical loss of the device or complete hardware failure.

The other thing to consider is whether you need to back all the data up in that external drive. There may be data there that you can obtain easily if you suffered a loss (eg music if you can download it again without paying again, things you have stored in cloud storage, programs that are readily available). The problem then is that your cron job / rsync command becomes complicated.

You might want to rethink how you’re organising your data; an internal ssd will perform very much faster than an external hdd - if you can move programs to the ssd and keep data on the hdd it will probably make a big difference to your performance. You might also find that you don’t need such a large drive for backup - you typically don’t need to back up programs.

Hardware advice is generally off topic here, but personally I’d say buy a second high capacity drive for backup. If you’re close to capacity in your current drive, or if it’s slow and reducing performance, you might want to consider getting a fast drive with larger capacity for your main use and using your current drive for backup. If your current drive has plenty of space and is fast enough, I’d get a new external drive just for backup - so it doesn’t matter how slow it is (hdd rather than ssd would be fine) - it just has to be big enough and reliable.

While this question isn't specific to the Ubuntu OS, I see quite a lot of similar questions related to machine backup strategies. So, for my own home network, I've been using BackupPC for well over 10 years. I'm running Ubuntu Server on a mini-ITX box, and it's been great. Configured to back up my network machines nightly.

What's particularly good (and you mention this in passing) is that this particular backup solution uses rsync, so backups are very efficiently stored. In my own case, I've backed up ~10 TB of data that's stored in ~360 GB of (de-duplicated/compressed) data.

There are plenty of BackupPC threads in this community, so I'd urge you to do some reading.