I'm looking for some advice regarding the backup of my root partition (sda1) from my small home server. (sda1 is a 50 GB partition on a wd green 2TB disk, the rest of the disk is commonly used, non critical data)

I have a small software based RAID1 (md0) where i'd like to fit it on. Running the OS from the RAID1 is not desirable since it's running on older, slower, noisier and less energy efficient disks. (the array is 50 GB in size, and the remaining size from both drives is used in a linear array md1)

All filesystems are ext4.

What I would like is to have a daily incremental or weekly 1:1 backup. It would be nice if it could be compressed so I could backup some other stuff on there.

I have been looking at some options and I would like some opinions.

dd or dump are good options, since they are exact backups. It's fairly slow and not incremental.

cp, rsync and tar would work nicely since they can use gzip to trim the fat, they are also incremental. Only disadvantage is the loss of the partition table.

Perhaps there are other solutions that I may not have found yet

try using drivish from www.dirvish.org, it is a great tool based on rsync

you can get daily and weekly backups and only the changed files are using real space, all the others are hard linked with previous backups.

RMI