[lug] Backup

[Zan Lynx]

On Tue, 2005-12-20 at 15:20 -0700, Evelyn Mitchell wrote:
> * On 2005-12-20 14:44 Siegfried Heintze <siegfried at heintze.com> 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.
> 
> RAID is not a backup.
> 
> Even without hackers, you need backups to protect against "fat fingers" and
> pbkacs (problem between keyboard and chair). It's just too easy to move a
> file to the wrong place, or delete something by accident, not to have
> backups.
> 
> We're using a parent/grandparent backup system, which saves copies
> going back in time. So you can recover not just the last saved copy,
> but a copy from 2 weeks or 2 months ago. With storage space so cheap,
> and human frailty a constant, it's a good compromise.
> 
> jafo's going to write up details of our home storage system, and will
> blog about it here (soon): http://www.tummy.com/journals/users/jafo

RAID is handy for when the drives do fail, which *will* happen.  (Says
the man with a Western Digital 3GB from 1997 running his firewall.
*crosses fingers*)

But backups are needed too.  I recommend rdiff-backup.  It is
command-line, but easy to use in my opinion, and very powerful.  It uses
a packed binary diff format to save space.  It lets you go back in time
to pick up old versions of files.  It runs pretty fast.  It's really
easy to script into a cron file.

I have a USB Maxtor One-Touch backup drive.  I don't use the button,
although I think there's Linux support for it.  It does seem to go to
sleep well enough, which is good because I only want it to wake up
around midnight for the backup.

I don't do it myself (well, I do at work) but I recommend putting
backups offsite.  Swap out USB external drives, or use tape or CD/DVD,
and send it to friends, put it in a safe-deposit box, or something.
That protects against fire, flood and theft (or legal confiscation as
evidence) of the originals.
-- 
Zan Lynx <zlynx at acm.org>
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