[ale] Personal Backup Strategies?

[David Tomaschik]

Rsync might be viable, but I suppose the files are unencrypted (excluding
the SSH tunnel) in transfer -- rsyncing the raw LVM probably results in way
too much overhead.  Guess it's another place to setup LUKS-crypt.

I'm wondering what kind of tape drives are reasonable for personal usage.
Even the smaller ones we use at work are in the $2000+ range, which far
exceeds what I can invest into this.


On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 12:43 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan loaded with back up tapes!
>
> Once the cost of a tape drive pair, one stored off site for fire
> protection, is choked down, local and off site backups become much easier.
>
> Park a cheap system with a big raid 1 at a friends with good bandwidth and
> rsync at night. Set up a box for the friend at your place.
>
> On Feb 3, 2010 11:24 AM, "David Tomaschik" <david at tuxteam.com> wrote:
>
> I've looked through some of the archives, but I was hoping to get a better
> take on people's personal backup strategies. I have about 200GB of data that
> needs to be protected.  This includes personal projects, academic work,
> email archives, photos, home videos, and other data that cannot readily be
> replaced.  Lately, however, this is growing at a rate of ~50GB/year, so
> expansion is obviously an important point (thank you video cameras and 10MP
> stills).  I am significantly less concerned about anything that can be
> replaced (e.g., videos of talks at conferences that I have downloaded).  I
> see 3 categories of predominant threat when it comes to backups, with
> increasing levels of backup required to protect against them.
>
> 1) File system corruption/accidental deletion -- external backup drive
> should be sufficient.
>
> 2) Hard drive failure -- RAID 1?
>
> 3) Burglary/theft/fire/flood -- I am assuming here that my entire residence
> is a loss.  This means some sort of off-site backup.
>
> Currently, I have a 500GB and a 1TB Hard drive in my computer.  The 1TB
> uses LVM and has a 300GB LUKS-encrypted partition for /home/david.  All of
> the important data is within this partition.  Excluding photo and video, I
> would like to ensure that any backup strategy writes this data to media in
> an encrypted form.  My current backup strategy is pretty much an external
> (USB 2.0) 1TB HDD that's also encrypted with LUKS and is rsync-ed from my
> home.  It's then placed in a fire-resistant lockbox.  Of course, such
> lockboxes are no guarantee in a fire, and both my desktop and the lockbox
> are likely targets in the event of theft.
>
> What strategies are there to better protect myself?  Optical media seems
> nearly impossible given the sizes involved (unless I invest in blu-ray, but
> the media there is still very expensive).  Additional hard drive (encrypted)
> locked in my desk at work?  (Which makes me wonder how well hard drives
> would stand up to frequent trips in the car.)  I can only imagine network
> backups over my cable modem, and the cost of 200+ GB of network storage.
>
>
>
>


-- 
David Tomaschik, RHCE
System Administrator/Developer
http://tuxteam.com
GPG: 0x6D428695
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