personal backup

Sat Aug 13 15:09:38 UTC 2011

On 2011-08-13 16:53 , John Levine wrote:
>> Backups remain a tricky problem to get right.
> 
> Yeah.  I've been using external USB terabyte disks, which work OK but
> are irritatingly flaky.
> 
> I keep thinking that this is what tape is for, but every time I look
> at AIT or LTO tapes and jukeboxes, they seem to be about a generation
> behind the disks in capacity or so expensive that I can buy ten TB
> disks for the cost of a five tape jukebox.

Simple and cheap solution:

 - NAS box with a proper RAID-5 disk-set
   (or just one of your servers that has enough disk space)
   use this to do your backups to with your favorite tool
   (duplicity, rsync, etc) at the times that you think is useful.
   (And one can create a TimeMachine box using the netatalk package)
   This is your 'always online' backup, containing the last X revs

 - Disk-dock attached to the NAS
   (eg
http://www.disk2go.com/d2go/shop/downloads/produkt/index.html?t_ParentID=241)

   Just plug in a disk there once in a while and rsync to it.
   One could keep multiple disks with the same data for multiple
   different revisions or when using rsync hardlinks even all revisions.

   As one can get SATA disks at 2TB or 3TB one will still have to chunk
   up the NAS box into pieces most of the time but that is all
   scriptable (filesystem labels are useful to detect which disk
   is there to automate that selection even further or heck put a file
   on it describing the contents).

Presto, off-line backups, just like a tape solution but much much faster
and much much cheaper and easily expandable/upgradeable to new bigger
harddisk models to grow along with your RAID box and other needs.

Don't forget to store those offline backups far away from the NAS box
and to of course properly secure all of it so that if somebody
physically steals it or hack the thing remotely they don't have a copy
of your whole live, google/facebook and other such companies would hate
to sink to the second spot of who owns your data...

Greets,
 Jeroen