[lug] Backup

[Siegfried Heintze]

I would like to see of discussion of RAID for home office systems. After
discussing my home office software consulting needs with some local
retailers, they talked me out of RAID because RAID only protects against
hardware failures and not hackers. I was hacked approx 18 months ago and it
was mighty painful rebuilding my disk -- even with backups.

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).

(1) So if you are using RAID 1, can I infer that you believe the threat of
hardware failure is greater than that of hackers or viruses or other
destructive software (like accidentally typing fdisk)?

(2) I was told it is not effective to have half a RAID1 set powered down 99%
of the time (which is what I wanted to do so no hacker could access my
backup). Is this true?

(3) In addition I hope to install Mondo rescue make a bootable image of my
boot disk on DVD and then I could store this off site should my house burn
down. I heard, however, that DVDs are less than ideal if they are more than
a year old. Is this true?

Thanks,
Siegfried

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces at lug.boulder.co.us [mailto:lug-bounces at lug.boulder.co.us]
On Behalf Of Daniel Webb
Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2005 1:11 AM
To: Boulder (Colorado) Linux Users Group -- General Mailing List
Subject: [lug] Backup

I finished my web page on my attempt at a cheap but very robust backup
strategy for a home Linux system, I'd like some criticism of it.  Especially
interesting to me would be any worst-case scenarios I'm overlooking, even
far-fetched ones.  

http://danielwebb.us/software/backup/

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