Backing up to DVDs

[Damien Elmes]

Kim Holburn <kim.holburn at anu.edu.au> writes:

> If it's just to stop someone reading files, tarring won't do it. If you
> write a tar file, what would stop someone taking it to the machine of their
> choice and untarring the shadow file? On the other hand you want to keep
> ownerships and permissions so you can restore properly.

If you're concerned about security, use GPG or mcrypt on the tarball.

> and of course there's the dreaded midnight commander.

And emacs's dired mode, too.

And you can even setup transparent decryption via crypt++el in emacs - but for
large tarballs that's probably not a good idea. Better to back up /etc and any
private data in one tarball, and the rest in another.

... or better yet, consider why you're backing up the entire system at all?
Why not just save a listing of your available packages, and maybe /etc - plus
any of your personal files in /home. There doesn't seem to be any reason for
backing up binaries when you can just reinstall the packages automatically.

Regards,

-- 
Damien Elmes