On Oct 20, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Matt Graham wrote:
From: Alex Dean <[email protected]>Now, I'm trying to make a plan for those backups to survive the house burning down or some other total catastrophe. I don't want to lose 10 years of digital photos in an emergency like that, and pushing all this data over my internet connection isn't feasible.2 USB2 drives of sufficient size, rsync, and a friend who lives at least a mile or 2 away. rsync the dirs containing backups of the important junk to the USB drives. Give one drive to the friend, keep the other at home. Every few days, rsync the drive you have at home, then swap that drive with the drive your friend has. That way, you lose at most a few days of data if your house burns down. No net connection needed. All you need is a friend you see regularly, or a secure storage locker you can get to every week. Note that this might be difficult or expensive if you have more than 2T of data to back up. You can also use dm-crypt on the backup USB drives for additional security.
Been doing some reading about the state of SATA hot-swapping, and I'm starting to agree that USB might be a better option.
I liked the idea of swapping out the spare RAID drive, since then the 3rd drive would always be up-to-date whenever I decided to swap disks. With rsync, I'll need to schedule the job ahead of time, and wait for it to finish before swapping. That's really not a huge problem. Having the drives accessible via USB also makes them more accessible from other systems if disaster really does strike, and that's worth something.
I'm now weighing the rsync+USB drive option against cold-swapping the spare drive in my RAID array. Powering off the backup server to change drives is not a big deal, though a hot swap would definitely be nicer.
alex
PGP.sig
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
--------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
