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Once I get everything back up and running, I want to start making it a habit to back things up on a regular basis. I was wondering what others on this list did for their backups.
any recommendations?
The last system I bought came with onboard RAID (HPT 370), so I looked into using RAID as a backup system. From what I recall, my options required me to trade off performance for security--or use 4 drives. Being poor, my system is already too slow and 4 drives was too expensive. Simply backing up to another partition on the main HD doesn't help when drives fail (I always seem to blow out the controller on the drive).
So what I opted for was 2 physical drives in the machine: hda and hdb.
Then I just set up an rsync script to run every day through cron. I believe the script I initially used was syncro.pl from an IBM DeveloperWorks article. At any rate, I modified the script for my setup and then used it to mirror exactly hda to hdb.
Now, when hda dies, all I have to do is to reach in and move the cable on hdb from secondary to primary IDE, and move the jumper to master.
Then when I fire up the system, it is like nothing happened. Of course my fileseystem is only as current as 4am that day when the drive was mirrored; you could always just mount the drive and save files to it too, if you need more current backups.
I can even do pretty big mistakes with file deletion, mount my mirrored disk, copy the deleted files back to my main drive, and I am good to go---as long as I don't delete files needed to reboot or copy. Otherwise, I just switch the cables and the jumper on hdb and reboot.
Since implementing this backup system, I have never lost more than a few hours of work on anything. I don't have to worry about how to restore after a drive or fs problem, no rescue disks are needed, and best of all, with rsync, once the drive has been copied the first time, all that needs to be copied subsequently is the files that have changed that day (and rsync doesn't even have to copy the whole file!)
But there are two problems with this system. First, the two drives are in the same machine, in the same room of the same house. Theft, fire, meteorites, etc. can totally wipe out my files. Second, this system does require two drives. At first it was hard to shell out cash for a drive that wasn't available for extra storage, but after the first time I needed it, that ceased to be a problem!
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Leslie C. Miller, Ph.D. LHH 447 Dept. of Languages, Literature, and Communications Mesa State College 1100 North Ave. Grand Junction, CO 81506 (970) 248-1894 -------------------------------------------------------------------- GnuPG KeyID F5F77F94 Key fingerprint = EA66 E27F 1A8D 0316 B4D0 E437 3AE5 61AF F5F7 7F94 gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys F5F77F94 --------------------------------------------------------------------
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