HDD Backup Suggestions?

[thismafiaguy]

I'm looking for a way to back up my computer locally, to the point where I could simply swap the current drive out and boot my computer with the external backup drive and virtually pick up from where I left off.

I reckon I should set up RAID 1, but does that mean if I screw something up on my primary drive, the mistake is instantly copied over to the backup as well?

My goal is to have the backup drive running anywhere from 1-3 days behind the primary drive so there will be some room for error in case I do something stupid in the morning and don't realize it until the afternoon.

 

[AutomaticCoding]

With raid 1, yes, it does, it's written at the same time during write, I believe.

This for sure isn't the best way, but, I've recently been fiddling around with DD which is why it's on the top of my head, but, with DD you could do:-

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

and put that in a cron script to run every week/whatever, that'd copy sector by sector each sector (Sectors are sectoring fun!), but, it'd obviously also copy and disk fragmentation/etc.


EDIT:- Or:-
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1042063

EDIT:- Referring back to my dd example (Which was shit):-

automatic@automatic-G74Sx:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
[sudo] password for automatic: 
17747977+0 records in
17747976+0 records out
9086963712 bytes (9.1 GB) copied, 336.906 s, 27.0 MB/s

I'm so utterly bored.