On Friday 12 March 2010 16:16:31 Philip Stubbs wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have recently been thinking about what to do about my backups for my
> home computers. I have a laptop, desktop and a server. The server has
> mirrored disks and is in a separate part of the property. I currently
> copy data between the three machines in an ad-hock fashion. Not very
> clever really. I would like a more robust solution and have been
> thinking of off-site storage.
>
> At the moment, I have a free Dropbox account that works great. Ubuntu
> one has not been so great. Initially, I thought that I could simply
> buy some extra storage but the cost is not so cheap. Somewhere it was
> written that both Dropbox and Ubuntu One use Amazon S3 for storage.
> This lead me to thinking that I could use this service directly.
>
> Has anybody else tried this? what has been the results? Are there any
> simple and competitive alternatives?
>
You have done the difficult bit of finding a spare machine and finding somwhere
secure (in the sense of fire and access) to put it.
With your current set-up a network cable to the remote machine would allow you
to take a backup in an automated manner by running a backup script on startup
of the backup machine. This could be controlled by a simple timeswitch, or by
wake-on-lan commands.
This is what I will be doing in the (hopefully not so distant) future. You can
also control the level of security and redundancy you have (if this is
important to you).
As long as you have enough space (1TB disks are relstively cheap now) you can
just mirror the machines ('cp -u' or 'dd' for example). There are also more
ingenious ways to do backups, such as using rsync.
I may do a talk on my backup methods sometime, as it seemed to spark a certain
amount of interest at the last talk.
Tim B.
--
OpenPilot - Open-source Marine Chart Plotter
Lead Developer
http://openpilot.engineering.selfip.org
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