<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 14:13, Insurance Squared Inc. <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gcooke@insurancesquared.com">gcooke@insurancesquared.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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My office DB server sits in the back closet, I've dropped a couple of
big drives into it. Every night at 3am my webserver and desktops rsync
any changes over to the server to drive A. So I have a snapshop of
last night. Then on the backup server after the rsync is done I gzip
everything and copy that daily snapshot to drive B. Then once every
couple of months I burn a couple of snapshots to a dvd and clean up
drive B again. <br></div></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div>
<br>
Benefits:<br>
- it's automated. and it's fairly fault tolerant. If I forget to
clean up drive B I lose my daily archives but not my last night's
backup. Easy to add another desktop into the process as well.<br></div></blockquote><div> </div><div>Right now I have a server and a NAS. My $HOME uses unison on my laptop
to two-way sync with the server. (my other machines are ethernet
desktops, so they use NFS). All my data is essentially on both my
laptop and my server, though that may change as my laptop's disk is
getting full. The server is running raid 1+0 across four 500GB disks.<br><br>There is also a NAS running two 1TB
disks in raid 1 that has shared media (videos, music, photos) and all
of my girlfriends graphic design archive (about 400GB).<br> <br>
So my data is somewhat redundant against drive failure internally, but not against things like house fires or basement floods.<br>
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Cons:<br>
- It's not meant to be a bare metal easy restore. I'm just backing up
data (/home directories and config files). And after zipping I can fit
my entire operation on a DVD. I certainly don't have anything
approaching 700gigs.<br></div></blockquote><div><br>Bare metal restore for Linux is easy with a livecd, cp, and sfdisk. It's those other operating systems that throw fits if you change the disk from under them...<br>
<br>It's media that adds up. Alexis is a graphic designer for a print magazine, so she uses about 500MB-1GB per issue. Lots of data. I also have all of my Uncles videos, that ads up to about 50GB. I'll have to look into transcoding that to x264 or something a little more manageable. Plus photos, 30GB of CD rips, etc.<br>
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But first and foremost, when it comes to backups, remember that HD
space is cheap cheap cheap, so use it liberally. <br></div></blockquote><div bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"><br>This was my line of reasoning. I might spend as much on disks as I would on a tape drive, but I'd still need to buy tapes for said drive. In case of disaster, I'd also need another expensive tape drive to restore. With disks I need nothing special. <br>
<br>-- <br>Chris Irwin<br><<a href="mailto:chris@chrisirwin.ca">chris@chrisirwin.ca</a>><br><br>
Chris Irwin wrote:
<blockquote type="cite"><div><div class="h5">So it looks my Tape Library is no more. It is an ex-Tape
Library.<br>
<br>
I thought I would ping the list to see what everybody else is doing for
Backup and Recovery, both in terms of physical storage (I've got 700GB
and growing) to software used.<br>
<br>
I'm currently thinking about buying a few 2TB disks to use as my
physical media and swap them every week, then something like BackupPC,
rsync, or rdiff-backup to dump onto whatever disk is currently mounted,
possibly giving me nightlies within that week.<br>
<br>
For my Linux systems (read: important systems) restoration from a hard
disk would be as simple as cp and grub-install from a live-cd. What
about Windows and Mac OS? Are there any simple ways to restore those
systems without having to fall back to restoring data on a fresh
install? The Mac is my girlfriends primary work machine so downtime for
reinstalling and re-licensing is rather undesirable.<br>
<br>
The Windows machine is a toy for games, but reinstalling everything on
that is such a pain that I'd like to make restorations simple there too.<br>
<br>
Ideally I'd like to spend as little as possible on this, so things like
LTO-4 drives are out of the question.<br clear="all">
<br>
-- <br>
Chris Irwin<br>
<<a href="mailto:chris@chrisirwin.ca" target="_blank">chris@chrisirwin.ca</a>><br>
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