[lug] network drives as backup?

[David L. Anselmi]

D. Stimits wrote:
> I find myself possibly in need of a cheap backup device, and options 
> like tape drives are way out of my price range. One possibility that I 
> find interesting are network drives, not the expensive RAID stuff, but 
> simple things like the LinkSys EFG120/EFG250 or NSLU2.

Net drive, USB, hot swap, they're all the same with small trade-offs in 
price, convenience, setup.  I use external USB but it backs up another 
server over the network (using bacula).

The filesystem shouldn't matter as your backup strategy should just be 
using it to store files that contain all the backup info.

But whether you're thinking of something like bacula, or something more 
primitive like rsync, cp, or tar, you should figure out how you want to 
do recoveries first.  Then decide what backup system supports your 
recovery requirements.

Really.  Will you support bare metal restores, reinstall/recover, or 
just undelete?  How much time and effort can you spend doing a restore? 
  How much data can you afford to lose?  Sure, you don't have any high 
end requirements but thinking about it now will save you a lot of 
headaches when you need them least (like: Ooops!  I didn't know I needed 
to save my partition table (or LVM config, or...))

Dave