[lug] Robust storage

[Daniel Webb]

On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 05:19:20PM -0600, Sebastian Sobolewski wrote:

> Here is my paranoid setup:
> 
> 2 systems, each with a disk arrays running raid5.  The systems have 
> duplicates of all files I consider critical rsynced to each other. Both 
> systems are running with disk caches disabled, ext3 with journal and 
> attached to a UPS ( configured to shutdown if there is less then 15 min 
> of battery left ) .  All files have MD5 hashes calculated and the hashes 
> are validated to make sure any files that have not changed in the last 
> day match their hash. ( IE the file did not get silently corrupted 
> overnight ) And weekly backups to DVD of new files. I also run badblocks 
> on the disk drives every few weeks.
> 
> But this may be overkill for most situations.

That sounds excellent!  Can you post the scripts you use for the MD5
creation/validation, or at least send them to me?

Do you have a problem with shortened disk life after turning the cache off?  I
just tried it on my server, and it sounds like it's about to fly apart when I
start a backup... 

I just discovered rdiff-backup, that looks really nice for paranoids like us.
It is a mirror like rsync, but it stores the diffs, so you can go back to any
version in the past without too much overhead.    

Anyone have any bad experience with it?