[AUUG-Talk]: Power User Backups

[Norberto Meijome]

On Mon, 15 Jan 2007 00:38:58 +1100
Joel Sing <joel at ionix.com.au> wrote:

> The downsides are more than likely obvious - 
> they are arguably more fragile than tape, you'll only have two copies of your 
> data and if your data grows bigger than the unit you've got problems. 

If you run smartd (from smartmon tools), you can get quite a bit of warning
befor your disks die. (Not sure if SCSI drives support SMART though...). Tapes
are, IMHO, too much of a pain (and you need special hardware...etc)

anyway, run smartd on your usb drives once a week / month depending on your
load... all the time if you have them plugged in all the time.

I personally use rdiff-backup to backup this laptop (FreeBSD) to an external
location (used to be NFS share in a NAS, now it's simply a 40 GB USB disk). I
run my script about once a week or so... and keep 5 or 6 snapshots in the
rdiff-backup repository.  I delete them by hand when they get too many.

It works very well, for both small files and large ones (6 GB encrypted volume
container).

If anyone wants the scripts + config files, just let me know :)

B

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{Beto|Norberto|Numard} Meijome

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