[Cialug] Backup Solutions

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Arne Quanbeck <spam at arnequanbeck.com> wrote:
> Greetings!
>
>  I am setting up a Linux server and looking at backup solutions. I would
> like to have offsite backups with two hard drives. One drive would be on
> site in the server, the other would be off site, swapped on a scheduled
> basis. The simplest solution would seem to be SATA drives in a swappable
> drive bay. With this solution, the user would not have to work with cables,
> just swap the drive.
>
>  Has anyone used one of these with Linux recently, and how well did it work?

I helped someone set up a USB backup solution like this using several
external hard drives that are rotated daily. It works great.

For backup software I'm using rdiff-backup to backup my laptop and I
use rsync to backup remote servers. My remote servers backup to each
other (so a copies to b, b copies to a) and then my backup server at
home makes a local copy.

I have not had to do a full restore from rdiff-backup yet so can't
tell how that works. I have had to do a restore from the rsync backup
and it went perfectly. I reinstalled the OS using original media then
restored the backed up files.

This probably goes without saying, but the best backup solution will
be automated and (in my opinion) you shouldn't know it even exists
unless it breaks, in which case you should definitely know. I had a
failed backup solution once because it sent me an email every day and
it was hard to differentiate between an email saying everything was OK
and one saying it had a problem (and it was very verbose, listing all
the files that were backed up). After weeks or months of getting
emails with no problem I started deleting them without reading them.
You can guess what happened. It wasn't tragic, but it was a hassle for
sure.

(to be more specific, it actually only sent an email on error, but
every day there was a minor error because it was trying to backup some
special device or pipe or something that couldn't be copied or linked
- which was technically an error)

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode