[TriLUG] Hard drive recovery

[Owen Berry]

Actually, the strategy you describe below is what I will be employing. Up
until now I have been doing the regular CD/DVD backup, but, as can be seen
by my hard drive dying recently, this is not frequent enough. A daily copy
to an external drive, in addition to the regular DVD backup should meet my
needs.

Owen

On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 04:54:53PM -0400, Pat Regan wrote:
> Kevin Otte wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 09:32:00AM -0400, Owen Berry wrote:
> >> I would classify it as delayed remote raid. :-) Not a backup, but useful.
> > 
> > Very useful.
> > 
> 
> Quite useful, but still scary :).
> 
> > I have a cron job that does this via rsync with SSH keys every night.  Disks
> > are cheap.  The script is simple.  While it may not qualify as a full backup
> > to the "enterprise" geeks here, it definitely saves some serious headache.
> 
> The first rule to follow to greatly improve the quality of a backup is
> to seperate the read/write mechanism from the media.  I use hard drives
> for backups myself, but only for short term.  DVD burners and media are
> quite cheap (at least 4x media is cheap, probably 8x by now).
> 
> I trust my mirror plus my extra backup drive with my data for about a
> week to a month, usually (My backup drive is sized right that it can be
> wiped and used as a spare for the mirror).  I might be more paranoid if
> I didn't mirror my revision control repositories to my web space and usb
> drive, though.  :)
> 
> Anywho, I am babbling.  All I am trying to say is that if you really
> want to keep your data safe, you can get a 60 dollar DVD burner and a
> 100 disc spindle for less than a hard drive and USB enclosure.  The
> capacity is not the same, but most people don't actually have 4.3 gig of
> data that actually needs to be backed up.
> 
> Pat