[COLUG] Home based backup

[Tom Hanlon]

Hey Colug,

Curious about how you guys handle backups at home ?

My adhoc and disorganized system has outgrown it's usefullness.

I bought a big old external drive. I tore down my old CENTOS machine  
with software raid that had been my place to store important stuff. I  
was beginning to see a failure in the drive and I realized that using  
raid was actually increasing the chance of a a hard drive failure.  
Meaning I was always writing and reading to both disks , If I just  
ran a weekly rsync to a disk that otherwise would rarely be spinning  
then the second disk would last longer and the first would last..  
well it's life would be no shorter than if it was RAIDED.

I have little experience with RAID anyhow so my confidence was  
relatively low in terms of swapping in a new drive.

SO my new plan is to take important data from all my machines and  
back it up to my linux box. Weekly and on demand. Then back that data  
up to another drive on that machine and/or to external disk.

Advice, opinions , tools all welcome.

What do you guys use ?

The platforms involved are Ubuntu, Centos, Mac OSX laptop, I have a  
windows machine and I do not think there is anything that matters on  
that machine.

I will be setting things up this week.

--
Tom