I have a 1999 Mazda 626. I drove 5hrs the other day from WA to OR. Traffic was horrible and it was blistering hot. I had my A/C going most of the time, although at one point it started blowing hot air so I switched to having the windows open. I got to my husband's house, came back out 20 minutes later and there was a huge puddle on the pavement on the passenger side. I wanted to check it, but we were running really late so I didn't touch it. Didn't use the A/C for the rest of the day, no more puddles. I have to make the drive again this week and am worried. Is something wrong with my A/C? 


Question: Diff between backups: see permissions, group and owner and sym link differences
Answer: What you're really asking is: What is a good Backup Strategy for my server and that depends what you want to do when the lightning hits your server...

For me, speedy restore is what I want, so what I do is:

I have one additional small, old, cheap disk containing 2 additional partitions on the server: a 500GB ext4 partition containing the system back-ups and a  500MB FAT32 boot, diag partition (yep, MegaByte, and it's a bit too big!) containing CloneZilla.

Whenever I'm going to do some drastic changes to the server or whenever I feel I can afford a 5 minute down-time, I boot the server into the FAT32 CloneZilla partition, which then backs up my root partition excluding "/home" in 5 minutes! (using disk-to-image)

I've had to restore the image only once and it works like a charm: server was set back 1 month (as I wasn't sure when I introduced the problem), installed all its updates and then I had to redo my work from the last month which was basically installing a few utilities.

In addition to that, I rsync my /home and the system image backup partition weekly at Monday 03:00 am (which is when the server has its lowest usage).

If that's good enough for you, use the same strategy.