[lug] Off-site backup

[Chip Atkinson]

Well, here's how I do my off-site backups, but I'm lucky in that I have a
nice server. :-)

I have hot swap raid with mirroring.  I just pop out one of the drives and
take it home every week.  So far it's worked really well.  The machine I
have is an HP DL 385 and the drives are in their own carriers.  When one
looks at it, it's definitely something that is not "external".  
At work I have an 80G USB disk drive that I just rsync my main desktop
machine with when I feel a backup is in order.
This is an internal disk in a USB->ATA external enclosure that I got at
Compusa.

I used to use tape drives extensively but considering the capacity of a
tape vs. that of a decent but cheap ATA/IDE disk, I'd go with the disk.
Much faster, random access, still as portable as a tape just about.  

There may even be external USB enclosures for lap top drives in which case
it's likely to be smaller than a tape cartridge.

Chip

On Thu, 16 Feb 2006, Ben wrote:

> I'm trying to figure out the best way to set up an off-site data backup.
> Is there a standard media/method used for this?
> 
> We have ~20 gigs of data and maybe upwards of 500mb - 1gb that could
> change per week. Our internet connection is not very reliable, nor very
> fast, so I'm wary of a network backup to a remote server. We are looking
> for a weekly (full) backup where last week's and 2 weeks ago's data is
> stored off-site. The idea is make the backup require as little user
> intervention as possible. All the data is sitting in a directory on a
> linux server, so copying the data should be straight-forward.
> 
> We could do this with a tape backup system and 3 tapes. How reliable are
> tapes? The data is a little large for dvd's without it becoming cumbersome
> with all the different dvd's. Plus, burning a set of dvd usually takes a
> good amount of user-intervention. A set of external hard drives might
> work. I've heard about removable hard drives (as opposed to external?),
> but not sure how they differ from external drives. Anything I'm missing?
> 
> Any suggestions? Any comparison of the reliabilty of different methods
> would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Ben
> 
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