To protect my personal data against sudden hard drive failure, I basically began mirroring my internal drives to an external hard drive a while ago. I do this regularly with all of my data partitions, since I am unable to cleanly separate my most important data from other things, which may not be essential, but possibly not easy to replace.
Since the space on both drives is still sufficient, I see the benefit in simply copying all data, so that even a complete system failure would leave me with my newest files and system structure still intact on my external drive, which I find very reassuring.
The problem with this method is that:
- I can't be sure that the mirrored data is identical to the original files (except if I would do a checksum comparison on all files, which I only would know how to do manually at the moment and which would take a lot of time).
- Tools to mirror two partitions usually look for changes in the editing date of two files to identify what data must be copied, but are unable to tell if a file has canged on either side because of drive failure in some sectors and may have become corrupted or unreadable.
I would like to keep the ability to make a daily backup within some minutes and without imaging/copying my whole partition every time, but increase the security of my data with a different method than "simply copying" the files.
Is there any program or workflow available on Ubuntu that lets me keep my backup habits and addresses the issues I outlined above?
