I have a Debian server in my home that has about 8GB's of data that I can't afford to lose. All the data is under one sigle users home directory (/home/carlos/.

The Debian server has no GUI installed as is only a ftp & web server. The machine does have one single opical drive that is a dual format DVD burner (not dual layer).

With all that was noted above, how can I back up all of the data from /home/carlos?

you could use a couple of dvds and cron.

you could backup to another local PC with rsync

If it were me I would use a cron job and pickup a cheap external usb/firewire HD.

really depends on how often that data changes. If 7.5 GB of it stays static, just use one dvdrw to get the updates/changes.


soule

I want to back up the data to DVD so we can scratch out the NAS or external drive. How does cron work? Do I need to install this or is it just a command?

Cron should already be installed, if not, use apt to install it. `man 5 crontab` should give you all the info you need to setup cron. It's really quite easy.

This should actually be under Linux - Software though. Not a networking question.

You may want to install the "dar" command. It is like "tar" but is designed for working with floppies, CDROMs and DVDs. It can perform differential backups, and will even note when a file is deleted since the reference backup, so that if you restore, using the first backup and then the differential backups, you won't end up with obsolete files that had been deleted. It can be set up to wait after the first slice to enable you to backup of the slice on DVD and then continue when the backup is finished. The man page also references using parchive to be able to fix the catalog due to a media error.

man 1 -t dar | kghostview -
will allow you to print out the man page (once dar is installed) in a more formal form.