This old desktop isn't gettting any use, but I do need backups of my M15x made.

I have an old Pentium II desktop with 128MB of RAM and an Nvidia Riva TNT 2, and I'm going to put Puppy Linux on it when I have a chance. I plan to use this desktop along with a 1TB USB hard drive to backup my M15x over the network.

If any of you do something similar, or know something about the subject, which program would you recommend to perform these types of backups? If whatever you happen to suggest doesn't run on Puppy, I'm also open to trying other lightweight distributions.

Thanks!

 

Well one of the better ideas might be to install a Debian CLI system. As far as programs..what does the M15x run(OS)?

 

Throughput is going to suck on a Pentium II.

I back up all my local and non-local data with rsync, with a mess of options. For windows there's cwrsync which is cygwin + rsync. You only need the rsync client. For the headache it may cause to learn how to use it, it's an invaluable tool for backups over a network. Use it in combination with a samba share on the linux box or something.

When I run my backup every other day, this is the command line I use:

Code:

rsync -thHXpogrlS --no-whole-file --delete-before --delete-excluded --progress /source/ /target/

I'm not going to explain all of this since there is a manual, but a few important notes:

It's very important to use trailing slashes after the directory names.

You probably don't want to use --delete-before on a memory-constrained machine. I use it because I run very close to my storage limits.

--no-whole-file is the default on remote transfers. I use rsync for local backups from one disk to another so in this case the argument is not redundant.

--delete-excluded is important because it removes files in directories that haven't changed but have files missing on the source side since the last mirror

-S is for handling sparse files, if you have certain types of VM (or other) images this could make a huge difference

-t, -p, -g, -o, -X preserve modification times, permissions, group, owner, extended attributes

I do this transfer as root, you probably don't need to use extended attributes for a windows to linux host, but if you do use it, you can fake root permission with --fake-super

Anyway this is how I mirror multiple terabytes with the least amount of data going over the wire. You will probably want to read the section on compression in the manual, and make a note that you'll have to balance this against the crap throughput of the PII. If you're on a LAN it might be more effective to use as little or no compression as is necessary for your link speed.

 

USB 1.1 isn't going to transfer quick either.

 

Yeah a gigabit card (with an internal disk) is the way to go, but it's still limited to a slow disk on a slow interface with a slow bus using a slow processor... eating more power than it's worth compared to a cheap dedicated NAS box. But it's cheap...

Personally I've stripped down anything I own that's older than a P4.. just not worth powering on. I have boxes and boxes of obsolete parts, but not as much as this guy.

 

@Thomas The M15x is running Windows 7 x64.

@Groceries It will all be over a LAN as soon as I get my hands on an ethernet cord long enough to make it from my Pentium II machine to the router (which the M15x is already connected to wirelessly). My total transfer is only going to be a maximum of 500GB. So it sounds like samba share will allow access to the Linux box from a networked machine, and cwrsync on the M15x is what actually makes the backups. I was looking around Puppy and found that it comes with rsync already, and I was wondering if there is a reverse way to do this. Meaning the Linux box is what initiates all the transfers. I'm not sure which way is preferable, and thanks a lot for all the rsync tips. --delete-excluded sounds really useful for a backup drive with only one backup that's always changing. In the past I've just made multiple full backups instead of fixing the older one (which is a very inefficient use of the external drive's space). Not compressing the data at all makes the most sense to me. All the data has time to get to the Linux box overnight either way, and this way will stress the router more and the Linux box less (I actually have a laptop cooler under my router to help with large transfers of any kind).

Thanks again!

Edit: I hadn't refreshed the page recently and now I see the comments about USB 1.1/getting better parts or a NAS machine. While I like all of those ideas, I'd rather just save for a new main machine and see if I can make do with an older one for my backups. All I really need is enough bandwidth to get the transfers done overnight, which theoretically won't even be that big after the first copy.

 

Yeah you can do it the other way around if you make a share on your M15x and mount it on the linux box, then just swap the source and target arguments on the command line... it'll probably be a bit faster running it from M15x to the linux box as opposed to this way, but either way will probably get it done overnight. If you use rsync on the linux box with the share mounted from your M15x you skip having to mess with cygwin, which is a plus. If you use --delete-before do it on the M15x or your linux box will be swapping for days