[ale] home backup system

[James P. Kinney III]

I _USED_ to be a fan of the "dump it all onto another machine" process
until lightning hit a tree 3 feet from the side of my office. All of the
surge protectors did their job very well. But it couldn't stop the EMP
from trashing nearly everything anyway (150,000 V @ ~2x10^6 A >= 140V/mm
@ 20 feet from the strike. This is a field strength that can permanently
magnetize the read/write head on the hard drive and cook most IC
devices. It did all of the above. I had bare fluorescent bulbs glowing
for >15 seconds!). 

Backup the stuff you can never replace to a removable medium and remove
it off site. If not off-site, then get a fire safe rated for magnetic
media and store it with the door locked. If my backup-tapes had been in
my large safe, they probably would have survived the E-field intact.
They were effectively bulk erased. It would have taken about 1/4" of
good conductivity metal (copper, aluminum, gold, etc) to dissipate the
E-field I got hit with. For iron or steel, it would take nearly double
the thickness. 

On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 13:01, Nathan J. Underwood wrote:
> It's probably not an optimal solution, but I just copy data off to a 
> 'backup' server (it's a 350MHz celeron with 2 80GB drives mirrored).  I 
> have a little script that just zips up what I need to keep, and copies 
> it over to the backup drives.  I figure that the chance of the data's 
> original drive, and both of the mirror drives going out at the same time 
> is fairly remote.  Anything that's so important that that isn't 
> sufficient, I burn to CD-ROM.  Anything that STILL needs more, well, I'm 
> just screwed at that point.
> 
> lee hartley wrote:
> 
> > I am wondering if anyone has a backup solution they are happy with...I 
> > am wanting to setup some sort of backup system/procedure for the systems 
> > on my home lan...I have been leaning towards putting a dvd burner in one 
> > box and letting the others send their backup data there every other day 
> > and burn it to a dvd once or twice a week ...any thoughts? suggestions 
> > on clients/servers....
> > thanks
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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