[TriLUG] Re: Dieing hard drive?

[Pat Regan]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Ben Pitzer wrote:

> Backups are well and good, and I think that everybody should do them.

I couldn't agree more...  Especially considering how many IDE drives I
have been watching die recently.

> However, the problem is that (especially for a 120GB HD) a backup system
> with enough capacity is way too expensive.  Seagate has/had an IDE Travan
> tape drive for around $120, but that held 40GB max compressed.  That's 3
> tapes for a full backup of a 120GB drive.  Now, yes, I can see you saying
> that you don't need to backup everything.  And I agree.  However in a drive
> that large, the OS probably only takes up about 2GB, say.  Then you have all
> of the additional software, almost all of which you can reinstall, yes, I
> realize.  But how about the config files?  Data files?  Databases?
> Documents?  MP3s, Ogg files, mpegs, pr0n, resumes, email, bookmarks,
> contacts, gpg keyrings, desktop settings, etc, etc, etc.?
>

For home backups the only way to be economical is by organizing your data
in order of importance.  If my machines are any indication, most home
users should be able to get by with a DVD burner for backups.  Every so
often (3-6 months, depending on activity) I run a pair of full backups to
DVD and send one off site.  I believe my last full backup of my desktop
and laptop used 3 discs.  This backup is a full OS backup (minus logs,
cache stuffs, and my kernel source), home directories, and my Wine c
drives.  I do not include my media files in this backup, but they are
safely stored on DVD already.  I do the onsite backup to a rewritable
disc, the offsite backup to a write once disc.

Every month I do differentials against that backup set to rewritable
media.  I can usually fit the differentials for my machines plus two
remote machines onto a single disc.

Most of this is really just to get me up and running again quickly in the
event of a hardware failure.  Just about every single important file I
have is in version control, and I replicate my repositories on my web host
just about every time I commit a change.  I also try to keep them up to
date on my keychain as well, but I am usually a week or two behind on
that.

To help keep things managable I did some simple organization of my home
directory.  I make sure I consistantly put large video and audio files in
a few specific directories that are excluded from my normal backup.

I also created a "sandbox" folder where I do most of my testing and
compiling of source that I download.  I have no reason to backup every
version of package xyz that I have compiled.  I was very pleasantly
surprised with just how much space I saved not backup up all those .o
files :p.

> The fact is that a great deal of this data probably won't change.  But if it
> does, then you need to have a backup system with enough capacity to handle
> even an incremental backup that is at least half of your drive space.  A
> home system won't need this as much, unless you're like me, and constantly
> updating, adding services, testing new tools, etc.  But the fact is that to
> get a system with that kind of capacity is pretty salty.
>

If you have large amounts of constantly changing, very important data you
need an expensive backup system.  I also think everyone trusting their
backups solely to an extra hard drive or four are just asking for trouble.
I've been doing backups for enough years to know that the biggest
advantage of tapes (and DVD or CD) is that the media is seperate from
read/write mechanism.

My primary volume is a RAID 1 set, due to current financial limitations.
It gives me hope that if one drive fails I would be let without a machine,
but my old friend Murphy tells me both drives will eventually die at the
same time :).

> Unless some of you know of an inexpensive backup system that is larger than
> DVD and Travan tapes.  By inexpensive, I mean less than $500.  The $200 and
> under range would be better, but I'm not keeping my hopes up too far.
>

If you need to go inexpensive (I know I did!) the only real option is to
decide what data you can live without.  In my case my OS and files adds up
to around 8-10 gig per machine uncompressed.  YMMV, of course.  Nice DVD
burners are down in the 60 dollar range, and cheap DVD+R media can be had
for less cost per gig than CDR.

> Regards,
> Ben Pitzer

I probably shouldn't have directed everything in this reply towards your
email, but I wanted to put all these thoughts together in one place.  It
sounds like you probably agree with what I am saying but your email looked
like the best one to reply to :).

Pat