[ale] Re: File Backup (sort of)

[Thompson Freeman]

Well, since I just paid for radiator fan work on the car, purchasing a
spare hard disk is tempting but financially lightly stressful.

Actually, being able to put just files onto CD is an opportunity to let
the children (and myself) selectively retain files we need, and eventually
dump what we don't use/care about. Just mount the CD, browse, copy, and
unmount. When six months have passed without looking on the CD, toss it
(or archive). This removes all the cruft and lint lying about, allows
developing a better filing structure (needed), and keeps life simple 8-).


On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, Mark Horn wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 07:27:20PM -0400, Thompson Freeman wrote:
> >Now I actually do have a semblence of
> >backups for this machine, but I would like to do something different if
> >possible: copy all reasonable files (not Netscape cache files and the
> >like) to CD-ROM as files. 
> 
> For what it's worth, I've looked into doing backups to other mediums
> (like CD's) and what I found was that tapes were expensive, but provided
> sufficient capacity without requiring a media change.  CD's were cheap,
> but required too much effort to complete a single backup due to the
> inordinate amount of media changes that I had to do.
> 
> My personal choice was to purchase a second hard drive and backup to that.
> At the time, the cost of a 2nd 20GB hard drive was $80.  Prices now are
> even less.  I've mirrored the partition scheme on the first drive to
> the second drive, and I have a script that runs out of cron.  The script
> does the following:
> 
> 	1) Mounts the 2nd hard drive paritions
> 	2) Uses mirrordir to copy all data to the second hard drive.  
> 	   http://mirrordir.sourceforge.net/
> 	3) Runs lilo so that if the primary drive fails, I can boot off of
> 	   the 2nd drive.  If you use grub, this step is probably not
> 	   necessary.
> 	4) Unmounts the 2nd drive's partitions
> 
> A full backup takes less than 15 mins.  Incremental backups take about
> 4 mins.
> 
> Notice that I don't do RAID with these disks.  RAID is not a backup
> mechanism.  It's meant for reliability.  If you accidentally remove a
> file from one RAID mirror, it will get removed from all of the other
> mirrors, too.
> 
> If you have more robust backup requirements you could purchase an IDE hot
> swap drive bay so that you could swap the drive in and out as necessary.
> I don't have such requirements.
> 
> Whatever you do, don't forget to test your recovery procedures.  Backups
> are only as good as your ability to recover from them.  
> 
> Cheers,
> - Mark
> 

-- 
===========================================
The harder I work, the luckier I get.
                    Lee Iacocca
===========================================
Thompson Freeman          tfreeman at intel.digichem.net


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