[lug] Backup

[Siegfried Heintze]

Regarding our earlier discussion on December 20:

So let us suppose I get hacked or type fdisk by accident or a drive fails.

Do I have a disk to boot from if
(1) I buy hosting and send rdiff backups off site?
(2) I backup to a USB disk?
(3) I backup to a consumer grade network disk?

I believe in each scenario, I have to get out the installation CDs/DVDs and
install the operating system to boot. If it is a hardware failure, I have to
purchase a new hard drive. I'm really slow and it takes me a terribly long
time to rebuild a dual boot windows/linux system by the time you include all
the software development software.

I guess one can boot from the network, but I don't know if my network card
has the required capabilities. How do I tell? If I do have that capability
int my network card, would I be booting from another PC's drive or could
this be a consumer grade NAS or SAN (assume there are such things).

Is there a better way to mitigate this other than my procedure of weekly
connecting a second drive and using "telinit 1 ; cp /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2"?

Thanks,
Siegfried

>Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2005 3:13 PM
>To: Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List
>Subject: Re: [lug] Backup
>

>Finally, swapping hard disks is so last century.  (Says he with a number 
>of IDE trays.)  You can get inexpensive external USB drives and even 
>network drives.  There's no need to physically open the case and risk 
>bending pins or pinching cables.

>> So now I have two identical disks that could be joined as a RAID set 
>> but are not. Once a week or once a month (depending on how much I've 
>> used the
>> system) I power down the system, connect the twin drive (which is 
>> normally powered down), boot up linux, type "telinit 1" and "cp /dev/sda1
/dev/sda2"
>> (or something similar, I don't have my notes handy).
>

>Ugh.  What a hassle.  Buy a USB drive enclosure for $40 and do what I
>describe on my web page or something similar.  Find a friend or buy
>hosting and send rdiff-backups off-site.
>

>
>Related question: does anyone know if the cheap consumer-grade network 
>drives supports anything other than windows filesystems & protocols? 
>E.g., via a downloadable flash update?
>