Jonathan Wilson wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> Now that we've spent a good deal of time setting up our system of servers, it's
> occurred to us that we should be dome something more rigorous then once a week
> manual "cp -a /etc /backup/$DATE"
>
> First off, we do NOT want to buy a commercial app like Arieka or BRU. We want to
> use Free Software, and will write it myself if we can't find something good
> enough.
>
> Also I'm NOT going to use tape. Hard drive space is cheap, and so are CDs. And
> faster, IMHO.
> ...
> 5. we need to be able to do a very quick reinstall if, say, a hard drive totally
> fails, or a cracker breaks in (in both cases it would require starting from
> scratch).
I am definitely in a different situation from you, being on a single
user desktop system, so maybe my ideas are impractical in your case. But
I make my living off my computer and a rapid recovery from disaster is
essential for me. And since disks (and computers) are VERY cheap
compared to the value of the data I have on them, what I have done is to
buy identical disks, and make an exact copy of the system and
applications disk and store it in a separate location. The system and
applications stuff changes relatively infrequently, so I only
occasionally need to update this.
By the way, if you do have identical disks, then one of the relatively
obscure ways of doing this is using :
# cp /dev/hda /dev/hdb
There is no need to manually partition the second disk. This command
will copy over the partitions, extended partitions, swap, boot, and even
Windoze partitions. Unplug the original disk, plug the copy in its
place, and it will boot right up! It takes my system about 35 minutes to
copy a 20 GB disk.
> 1. At least some level of backup needs to happen every day, i.e. at least a back
> up of /etc to a local tarball.
> ...
> 3. We need to be able to get single files back out of the archive without a big
> to-do. You know, like if someone edit's Apache's conf file right before they
> leave and we find out the next morning that it's screwed up and we want to go
> back a day. This is my primary reason for not wanting to use tapes, and wanting
> to use hard disks.
Having previously administered a very small group of computers for
engineers, a found that having an actual online backup of the previous
day's user files made me very popular, and I still do this even though I
am the only one using my computer. Rather than using actual disk
mirroring software, I just created a very simple script run by cron in
the middle of the night to create this backup. And by doing it onto an
NFS mounted disk, I had a quickly available backup to a failure of the
main server.
At that time, I made periodic backups to tape. But now on my own
machine, I burn a CD every few days with my complete user files. I don't
bother with compression or incremental backups, since the volume of data
I need backed up this way will fit onto a single CD. And like you, I
spread those CDs between two locations; half of them at work and half at
home. I use CDRs, since I like the idea of having the long term
archives.
Duane
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