[ale] Quiet spinning drives?

[DJPfulio at jdpfu.com (DJ-Pfulio)]

On 02/14/2017 05:53 PM, Alex Carver wrote:
> Now if only there was a way to image the whole machine while it was
> still running. :)

There is.  LVM snapshots + fsarchive

But imaging is so, so, so, Windows. It is extremely wasteful and I only
use it for the day I migrate from 1 old disk to a new disk.  Most of the
time, I use rdiff-backup and only backup enough to recreate the machine
to the same point. That saves 4-8G of OS crap that an ISO has already.
Restores take 30-45 min this way and always begin with a fresh install
of the OS from media.

Also, if your rsync backups are NOT versioned, you're missing out on
some very important protection. There's something about having 60-120
days of versioned backups that helps me sleep.  Sure, large media files
don't get that versioning, but everything else does.  Have about 20
systems backed up to a 1.5TB disk. They wouldn't fit if I used images
and the time needed to perform the backups would be much, much too long.

Efficient backups shouldn't take all that much storage.