[geeks] Backup Schemes?

[Doug McLaren]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 09:00:36AM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
| On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 08:52:55AM -0400, Robert Brooke Gravitt wrote:
| > So, what's your favorite ways of doing backup across your rescued  
| > systems? Each box to its own tapes, dumping to a backed-up nfs mount,  
| > tar dumps, etc?
| 
| http://www.rsnapshot.org over the network to a remote machine, and I 
| dump to DVD-Rs every now and then.

I'm with Bill on this one, though I'm just using rsync by itself.
(But dirvish and rsnapshot look cool, I may do that soon.)

At this point, tape drives and media are so expensive compared to hard
drives, it's easier to back up to hard drives for the home user.

I've got a 300 GB drive on one my computers dedicated to backups that
I rsync stuff to (and unmount when not in use), and a script that does
incrementals of sort to another disk, just backing up the smaller
files that have changed since the last run in certain directories, and
I've got a 160 GB USB hard drive that I rsync to and leave in my desk
at work and bring home every week or two for offsite backups.

Considering that the 300 GB drive was about $100, and the USB drive
was about $50, it's hard to justify anything like DLT drives and
media.  I've got 4mm, 8mm and DLT drives, but the media is so
expensive compared to IDE hard drives and DVD-Rs that it's just not
practical to use them.

Stuff that's really big and usually easily replaced (mp3s, movies,
etc.) just doesn't get backed up, though I might have it duplicated
somewhere else.

Oh, and for archiving stuff (i.e. I need disk space, but don't want to
delete it) I put it on DVD-R, but I have other scripts that add
md5sums and about 10% par2 files, and verify that the image written
matches what was supposed to be written (it's scary how often a
frehshly written DVD does not match my disk image used to create it
exactly.)  I haven't really had to test it, but I'm hoping that this
(the par2 business mostly) will protect them at least somewhat against
bit-rot, since in my experience the media rarely goes all at once --
instead, errors start appearing here and there.  And then they're
thrown into a dark closet ...

-- 
Doug McLaren, dougmc at frenzy.com
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equpped with 18,000 vaccuum tubes
and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vaccuum
tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons.  --Popular Mechanics, March 1949