[lug] Backup

[Bear Giles]

A RAID setup should look like a single physical drive.  It offers no 
protection whatsoever against hackers, malicious users or brain farts.

Simple copies to a single backup media offers extremely thin protection 
from viruses.  The problem is that there's a very high risk that you 
won't know you've been infected until your backup has also been 
compromised.  You either need to either use a versioning backup (e.g., 
rdiff-backup) or rotate media.

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.

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?

Bear

Siegfried Heintze wrote:
> 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