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I have a lot of hard drives from old computers (6-7 years old). i want to get an external enclosure with USB 3.0 and use them for back up.

To my understanding SimpleBackup copies everything the first time and then adds on iterations. so is it possible to have my backup distributed over a number of hard drives?

i'll back up on one hard drive. when it's full, i'll physically attach the next one and so on. when i need to get the files. the computer will tell me which hard drives to connect. i cannot connect all of them because i want to use only one enclosure.

oh, I use ubuntu

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  • most people would just use a big drive for backup. Rather than old hard drives small and not reliable.
    – barlop
    Mar 9, 2011 at 14:47
  • here's a silly idea.. I suppose you could label your hard drives, with names,and have files for each drive, with a list of all files on them. so if you want one you can find out what drive it's on.
    – barlop
    Mar 9, 2011 at 14:49
  • @barlop that's a good point !
    – kirill_igum
    Mar 10, 2011 at 6:08

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There are three types of backup:

  • Full backup

This is where the entire system is backed up every time.

  • Incremental backup

This is where only the files that have been backed up since the last backup are backed up

  • Differential backup

This is where files that have changed since the last full backup are backed up.

I would advocate using a combination of number 1 periodically and either number 2 or number 3 on a regular basis.

For example, every time you start a new hard drive begin with a full backup. Then all subsequent backups to that hard drive should be either incremental or differential.

The choice of which to use is yours. The only real difference is when restoring.

If you choose Incremental then you will have to restore the full backup plus every incremental backup between that full backup and now.

If you choose Differential then you will have to restore the full backup and only the latest differential backup.

Differential backups take up more space than incremental though.

Hope this helps you work out a backup strategy.

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  • i meant the incremental backup. but my question was how to do it technically over multiple drives so that only the first one has a full backup and the rest have increments. i have another big hard drive for backup and i want to have an extra copy in the smaller ones.
    – kirill_igum
    Mar 8, 2011 at 17:54

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