[ale] Personal Backup Strategies?

[Pat Regan]

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On 02/03/2010 08:31 PM, David Tomaschik wrote:
> This makes a lot of sense.  The vacation photos and videos and my music
> collection sound like excellent cases for this category.  I just need to
> script carefully to exclude these in the more frequent backups.

The only part of my backups that I do this with is my photos.  They're
all in a good dated hierarchy which makes it easier.

> I'm probably going to use something like Duplicity[1] (found from
> rsync.net) to do this to my VPS daily.  It's hosted here in Atlanta, so
> not super-remote, but should be plenty far for most situations.

I have yet to actually use Duplicity but it seems to be very similar in
spirit to rdiff-backup.  Both do a good job of very efficiently storing
differential backups, which is awesome.

> And your phone still works as a phone?  Haven't heard of putting Debian
> on an Android.

It is really just a Debian chroot on the microsd card.  Android's
environment Linux environment is actually fairly poor.  It is very
lightweight and very lacking in libraries.

I haven't bothered trying to get cron (or something) working on there
yet, though.  I have an interesting network issue...

I'm in an apartment that is pretty saturated with 2.4ghz.  I grabbed an
old 802.11a router on ebay that I'm using as at access point.  Sometimes
the two 802.11a devices (my laptop being one of them) become
inaccessible to the 802.11g devices on my openwrt router.  All the
devices can hit the wired ports, though.  I haven't done much
troubleshooting yet.

> I need to get that going first.  Hopefully I can switch to RAID 1 with
> only adding 1 disk.  Maybe a RAID 1 with 1 drive marked as failed, dd
> the data over, and then bring the other drive in as a replacement.  I'll
> have to stop and think about that some more.

You shouldn't have a problem adding a drive and setting up a RAID 1
using md with a failed drive.  I'd do a file level copy of the data,
though.  You don't want to waste time copying the empty blocks and your
new RAID block devices might be slightly smaller than the originals
(I've never checked this before).

> Is there a point at which I should be concerned about ISPs caring?  I
> know they do for large P2P, but I'm not sure where the real threshold lies.

I don't have a good answer.  Aren't the advertised monthly limits in the
20-30 GB per month range?  You should be more than fine.

Pat
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