Howdy, Long story short that leads up to my questions, I paid off some debt. Finally I'm getting around to doing some things I been wanting to do. One of them, backups. I bought a hard drive enclosure that has a fan to keep things cool. Figured I would get a decent one that hopefully will keep my drives working. My relevant setup.
I started with a 3TB hard drive for my /home directory, one partition, years ago. I stuck LVM on it so that I could add to or move things around a bit with some ease. Once that was starting to fill up, I bought a second 3TB drive and added it to the LVM volume. So, in effect, I have a 6TB drive with 3.6TB of data on it at the moment. The biggest user of that space is videos. I just bought two external drive enclosures. One is sort of a spare but I do plan to do some backups on it, mostly pictures from my camera. In one of the enclosures I put a single 6TB drive that I found on ebay. It has about 7,000 hours on it so it should have some life left yet and it passed the smartctl tests. It is USB but it transfers fast. Now to some questions. I use rsync. Command looks something like rsync -auv /source/ /destination/. If I backup the config files in my home directory, should I also include the --delete option? If after a upgrade for example a config file is deleted, because it is no longer needed, or renamed, should the old file be removed or is there a reason to keep them on the backups? Adding the --delete option isn't a problem command wise BUT I wonder if it can cause a problem at some point. Thoughts on that. I plan to use the --delete option for videos since if I deleted one, it is likely broken or something. Biggest question is about config files. On the second enclosure I currently have a 160GB drive. It's big enough for my camera pictures. I would like to backup up my pics to it and then put the drive somewhere besides in the house. I have a couple external buildings that would be safe as far as rain etc but they are not cooled, even tho it gets close to 100F and humid, real humid, here. My question is this. Is it safe to store a drive in that sort of environment? I could see the building getting close to outside temps during the day. I do put a heater in it to prevent freezing during the winter. I usually set the heat to 40F. I'm hoping someone has some real world experience on storing in this sort of environment and not just a text book theory. One reason I want to put them elsewhere, house fire. Even a huge power strike could cause problems if plugged in. We do get lightening strikes here. Maybe not as many as some but our fair share. The 6TB and 3TB drive may join this one as well. I have a 3TB drive on the way, got a good deal on it. I plan to remove the 160GB and put the 3TB drive in the enclosure when it gets here. Later, I will get another enclosure for the 160GB drive. In the end, I will have 6TB, 3TB and a 160GB external drive. Main backups on the 6TB, possible second backup on 3TB of some important files and camera pics on the 160GB. Anyone have some real world experience on these sorts of questions? Thanks. Dale :-) :-)
