I've gone from DAT tapes, to Stacks of CDROMs ,to stacks of DVDs I've
now settled on stacks of hard drives.
at work I have a central office file server (contains all useful data)
is on a LVM drive ontop of mirrored (raid 1) drives. From time to time
add or replace drives and use the system-config-lvm to relocate onto new
hardware. (users only see a few minutes of downtime when I physically
change the drives. , then again when I resize the LVM partition )
Currently I'm using a bunch of 0.5TB and 1 TB drives the virtual dive
is 1.5TB with about 60% in use.
The central server is rsync-ed with another stack of hard drives twice
daily. I use the backup option with a the timestamp in the suffix so if
some file is updated I get multiple versions on the copy (I call it
"auxbackup") This machine has mostly 0.5TB drives in a LVM volume ( no
raid )
somefile.doc
somefile.doc~20100423_1223
somefile.doc~20100426_0033
The only drawback to the suffix is that it's the date the file was
replaced not the date that file was modified. (that seems to confuse
people) I have the auxbackup available (readonly) to users on the local
network. This comes in really handy because the #1 cause of data loss is
USER ERROR. this way I have a NO DELETE , NO MODIFIY version of all
files on the fileserver. If somebody overwrites or deletes the wrong
file by mistake, I still have it. I do have a crawler script that will
remove excessive backup copies of files, but the most changed files are
the small ones, so it' doesn't matter, and I don't use the script.
My Building burns down recovery is that the whole stack is again
rsync-ed to a machine in my house. That job only runs at night (gets
killed @8 am if it is still running) some times the remote system is a
few days behind. I can only update about 10Gig per night. Normally much
less than that is changed. If the office suffers a catastrophic event,
I'll physically bring those drives in. ( it would take weeks to download
it all )
I had a crisis some time ago where I totaly fucked up a drives LVM
header, so also do daily backups of my /etc/lvm/* as well as the output
from the "p" command for fdisk for every dive in the system. this data
goes to a database on the web. (only changes are saved) Notes on that
are here:
http://www.kangry.com/topics/viewcomment.php?index=18544 ( I run this as
a daily cron job on every computer I have )
so far, I haven't needed to use that data, I believe having it makes the
crisis that requires it less likely.
at home I probably have too much stuff that itsn't backed up. But the
things that are are doubled on two hard drives at the house. Some
things, with little logic as to what, are mirrored at the office, which
end up rsync-ed back to the house. ( this seems silly for some reason)
I've been managing some version of the same file server since about
1992. at the time it was an 500MB external hard drive attached to a Mac
and shared to PCs and Macs over an appletalk network. ( Gawd I hated that )
I have concluded that 1) most files are lost because of user error
2) All hard drives will crash.
3) It's not worth your time to archive stuff onto slow to recover media
( tape/CD/dvd) Takes time to make the backups, takes time to find stuff.
4) It's hardly worth the time to delete files. *really* Installing
bigger hard drives is almost always the solution.
My solution isn't going to be ideal for everyone. We do have lots of
large files, but they don't change a lot. If you had a lot of frequently
changing large files, you might need something more advanced.
my wife uses Timemachine on her Macbook. I hate it, and from time to
time I rsync her laptop to a server in my house. This actually saved her
once because the vmware windows partion file got hosed, and only my
rsync copy would boot. the other headache with time machine was that one
time, the external drive got screwed up somehow, such that the mac
wouldn't mount it, Linux could mount it fine, but not the mac. so the
timemachine backup was lost. It sure looks pretty, but I prefer backups
that LOOK LIKE A FILE SYSTEM that I can copy files out of.
--Russell
John D. Mort wrote:
Just thought I'd take a quick poll, as the Bluray topic is starting to
brush against this subject.
What backup strategies are you using right now?
I currently back up data between my computers in a daisy chain,
computer A has computer B's backed up files, computer C has computer
B's backed up files, etc. This strategy is starting to fail as my
protected data pool grows, so I just ordered a 1TB hard drive that
will sit in Computer A that everyone will back up to. Ideally I'd
like to get a high capacity NAS with a RAID that would handle all my
backups. But I want my money to do other things right now so that
will likely wait until I start outgrowing 1TB.
I understand that my exposure right now is the destruction of my home,
that's a threshold I'm comfortable with. I simply don't want to
afford backing up data to a cloud service. I had considered burning
critical information to some kind of disc media and having that live
in a safety deposit box, but I just can't think of anything I have
that is that important. (Which might just be oversight on my part.)
--
John D. Mort
http://john.mort.net
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
May 5 - Crack and LLVM
Jun 2 - Android
Jul 7 - Patent Absurdity - The Movie
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
May 5 - Crack and LLVM
Jun 2 - Android
Jul 7 - Patent Absurdity - The Movie
