On 3/20/19 6:59 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
On Wednesday 20 March 2019 16:14:26 Moses McKnight wrote:
Now y'all are making me nervous! Now what did I do with my backup
tapes...
Tapes? I've been using amanda, with virtual tapes on a big hd for over a
decade, and have found 2 things:
1: The hard drive is at least 10,000% more dependable
2: The virtual tape is no more complex than an array of directories on
the hard drive, and because the hard drive is random access, its about
that same 10,000% faster when you need to recover something.
Only if you want archival, off site storage of business data in case the
IRS comes calling, should you resort to tapes, and then I'd seriously
consider the only slightly increased cost of a hard drive on a per
gigabyte stored, use of hard drives you fill up, unmount and take
offsite. The first time an offsite tape pukes, it could cost you a lot
more than the cost of a much more dependable hard drive. Here, I'm 100%
hobbiest, so the 60 days worth of vtapes on a 2T drive satisfies my
major worries as I can lose a drive, run up to Staples and pickup
another, do a bare metal install with the LCNC LiveCD, get the amanda
home dir from the backup, get my wrapper stuff from the backups image
of /Genes-Amanda-Helper.061 then install amanda from its source, get the
amanda database data and configs that generated last nights backup,
recover the rest of it, and have that machine ready for tonights backup
long before its due to start.
You can't begin to do that with real tapes.
You may have been kidding about the tapes, but I'm not.
Basicly I'm lazy, computers are programmable, so why should I sweat it
when they can do a much better job at a repetitive thing like doing a
backup every night? It absolutely makes zero sense for me to do it.
All driven by a cron job, I don't worry about it getting done, nor do I
have to babysit it, it just gets done every night, and if I fall over
before sunup, it will continue to be done until someone kills the power
to these machines.
Since my missus is computer illiterate, crippled up and can't get to them
anyway, that would probably be up to one of my boys who are all swimming
or rescue boating in the Platte River right now. And despite my
preaching about linux, are all running winderz on their home machines.
And thats my $0.02 on the subject.
Thanks all.
Cheers, Gene Heskett
As you suspected - I was kidding about tapes :-) I use a simple program called
LuckyBackup that if I recall correctly uses rsync and runs every night. If I
plug in a thumb drive it will back up to that as well. I don't have it doing
rotations over a number of days but just a simple backup right now. I do need
to look at amanda or something and get something a little better set up in case
I delete something and decide I need it 3 days later!
All my source code is in git with copies on an off-site server - and that acts
as a backup where no change is *ever* lost (theoretically at least).
The only windows I have here is an old computer with Win XP and also an XP VM in
virtualbox that I'll fire up once or twice a year if I need something off of it.
Moses
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