personal backup

Sat Aug 13 15:24:08 UTC 2011

On Sat, 2011-08-13 at 09:13 -0500, Joe Greco wrote:

> We used to use DVD's for off-site backup, but that's not been the best
> of solutions.  I've been experimenting with external hard drives but
> I am less comfortable with them; I've seen too many drives fail.  The
> idea of letting them sit for awhile and praying they spin up later
> bothers me.  :-)

I can understand that.  That's why I use a rotation and retention system
as well as two NASes syncing to one-another with the backups being
performed from the second NAS.  I treat them like I used to treat tape.
The onsites contain nightly incrementals as well as weekly full dumps.
These drives are rotated every week. Every month a copy of the latest
full dump is copied to another set of drives which are sent to offsite
storage.  I keep two copies offsite.  To implement this, I need a
minimum of nine USB drives.  I actually have 10 so I can have an extra
one onsite as a hardware replacement-spare.

Online    Nearline    Onsite       Offsite
Storage   Backup      Backup       Backup
----------------------------------------------

                      [USB7]<--{[USB5],[USB6]}
                        |             ^
                        V             |
                      [USB8]          |
                        |             |
                        V             |
[NAS1]>>>>>[NAS2]>>>>>[USB0]>>>{[USB3],[USB4]}
                        | 
                        V        
                      [USB1]
                        |
                        V
                      [USB2]

Nothing's perfect.  There's still risk but there's some amount of
assurance.

-- 
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