[kwlug disc.] backups yet again

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

What I am going to write does not cover Windows, but worth considering from
a bigger picture point of view.

There are significant differences between proper backup and just data
protection.

For example, many home users often tout RAID-1 or RAID-5 as backup, or a
second hard disk in the same PC as backup. While this protects from one hard
drive failure, there are many situations that it does not cover, for example
surge due to lightening, or theft.

Ideally, backup should be on a removable medium, ideally rewritable, and
that medium rotated offsite to protect against fire, flooding and theft.

Years ago, I had a break in, and the PC was taken with all the data on it.
Luckily, I had a one month old backup on Travan tapes, so I was able to
recreated everything once I got a drive from eBay.

For decades, tape was the most cost effective method of backup, and it was
removable too, so served well for the offsite requirement. However, for
residential and small business, there are no longer any *tape drives* and/or
*tape cartridges* that are cost effective and keep up with the increased
pace of hard disk capacity at a price point that is acceptable.

The 10G Travan tape drive I had served me well until I got digital cameras
(first 2 megapixel with 350KB per photo, then 4 megapixel with 950KB per
picture). Disk space usage skyrocketed and I could not fit it on one tape
for the weekly backup anymore.

I am currently using Linux ext2's "dump" and "restore" utilities to backup
*everything* on the server every week, and have incremental backups every
day. I use two external hard disks each in a separate USB enclosure. The
backup is done to one of them, then copied to the other, so there are two
copies (paranoia).

The command is as easy as:
/sbin/dump -0 -u -f /media/extdisk1/backup-full-yyyy-mm-dd /

and
/sbin/dump -1 -u -f /media/extdisk1/backup-incr-yyyy-mm-dd /

It runs from cron, so it is unattended.

The other day my daughter lost some stuff and I was able to recover it for
her form the Feb backup fairly easily.

The only gripes I have for this method are:

1. These enclosures work with Linux, but at least one of them seem to be
unstable. One of them will reset every couple of weeks, and I have to
unmount, power off and on, do an fsck and then mount it again.

2. It is not very effective as an offsite option, since I have to power off,
disconnect cables, ...etc.

The backup is around 40 GB (full, with 18GB being digital photos). I can't
fathom what people with DVD's and movies do.

So, my current thinking is to go either for one of the small NAS (e.g. by
Linksys, Netgear), or build a cheap one using a regular PC and move the
drives to it. This can use FreeNAS (BSD based) or OpenFiler (Linux based).
They offer NFS mounts that I can copy stuff to.

Still no effective offsite backup via removable media.

Finally, I leave you with the Tao of Backup, recommended reading
http://www.taobackup.com/
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