[buug] Backups [Was: Trapped in Upgrade Hell]

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Mon Mar 8 19:13:41 PST 2004


Quoting James Howard (buug at multivax.net):

> FWIW: On my home system, I have /home and /var on a RAID-1 mirror.  Files
> from /home, /var /etc, and some others are backed up fully and
> incrementally to an alternating pair of removable ide drives. I have 
> roughly 4 copies of my data at various states to protect against both 
> mechanical failure, and to a lesser extent, other types of loss.

Four generations of copies isn't really backup in any serious sense of
the term:  You either have snapshot so far apart in time that much of 
the change history is totally missing, or the backups go so little
distance into the past as to provide zero ability to recover from, say, a
hardware fault that is subtly corrupted your files six months ago.

That having been said, admittedly it's a great deal more than almost all
home users bother to do.

Oh, by the way, you store all those drive off-site, right?  So the same
fire or theft can't steal both your system and your backups?  (Thought
not.)

By the way^2:  So, you power down your system every time you attach or
remove backup media?  (Ick!)  Or do you actually trust your hardware and
data to {shudder} IDE hotswap?

> In the end, I found the cheap ide drive solution to be faster, more cost 
> effective, and convenient than a more stable (albeit expensive) tape 
> solution.

With only four generations (almost real backup), that's very likely the
way the economic comparison works out.  For real backup, it wouldn't.
Maybe some day, though.

More at:  "Backup Fallacies / Pitfalls" on
http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Admin .

-- 
Cheers,              "By reading this sentence, you agree to be bound by the 
Rick Moen             terms of the Internet Protocol, version 4, or, at your 
rick at linuxmafia.com   option, any later version."  -- Seth David Schoen



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