[COLUG] Home based backup

[shane]

On Jun 11, 2007, at 3:00 PM, Tom Hanlon wrote:

> 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.

I use a combination of tarballs/rsync and raid 5 array. The  
fileserver has a raid5 card in it w/ a bunch of cheap ide/sata 200GB  
drives in it. I rsync complete backups of chunks of that to older  
firewire drives that are in another area of the house hanging of a  
PowerMac - about once a week (ie music, movies, pictures, things that  
don't change that much on a daily basis). User home dirs, however, as  
well as /etc/ and log files from all server/dev machines are  
tarballed, put in a central 'backup' hierarchal file structure on the  
raid 5, then  rsynced to an encrypted disk image on my iPod.

For my OSX laptop I super-duper the entire disk, as often as  
possible, to a separate firewire hard drive. Same thing w/ the Powermac.

  Shane