Backing Up is Hard to Do?

Joe Barr writes "NewsForge is running a story this morning on a personal hardware/software backup solution for your Linux desktop (NewsForge is owned by Slashdot's parent OSTG). The solution doesn't require a SCSI controller, or tape drive, or the ability to grok a scripting language or archiving tool to work, either. It's based on point-and-click free software. Plus it includes a dead-parrot joke by Linus Torvalds."

Comments

Right....point a click

[Anonymous Coward]

A painless solution. After getting zlib, development packages for XFree-86, Qt 3, and KDE 3....

Two Words: NORTON GHOST

[wernst]

Why even worry about mounting and unmounting volumes from Linux? I just use Norton Ghost, which has been happily backing up my Linux partitions (or whole drives, pretty much regardless of partition types) for a few years now.

With just one or two boot floppies, I can back up and restore my Linux drives to either: other internal IDE drives, other parititons on the same drive, external USB1 and USB2 drives, burnable CDs, or burnable DVDs.

Heck, it is so fast and reliable, I've been known to backup the drive just before even *trying out* new software or options, and if I don't like it, I just Ghost it back to how it was.

Now, I know it isn't free, or even Linux based, but it is hard to argue with cheap, reliable, and fast backup procedures that just work all the time...

So is a boot to the head

[Just Some Guy]

That's not a backup - that's a userland implementation of RAID 1 with very high latency.

I make daily differential backups (via AMANDA) to a rotating set of 12 tapes. If I accidentally delete /etc/shadow or some other important file, I have nearly two weeks to discover the problem and restore a previous version from tape. Your idea gives you, oh, until about the time that rsync discovers the missing file and dutifully nukes it from your "backup" drive.

What you're doing is certainly better than nothing, but it's not a backup solution by any definition of the term beyond "keeps zero or one copy of the file somewhere else".

Far, far better would be for your script to use dump or tar to create incremental backup files on your USB drive and to rotate them out on a regular basis.

One Danger of hard drive backup

[TrevorB]

One flaw in any hard drive backup system: what happens if your system is cracked?

If someone gets into your system, they do an rm -r *, is your backup drive mounted?

What if they're clever and do a mount all, or find your backup.sh first?

I've seen some people take the first and last step of "inserting the USB cable" and "removing the USB cable". Is there any kind of automated system that would ease this, or is it the Hard drive equivelant of "Remove tape, insert new tape".

USB drives also suffer from problems with catastrophic failure, like a fire in your home.

I wonder if there exist any online backup systems that let you do offsite daily differential backups of your system (or critical files) that would let you download or mail you an image of your harddrive (on DVD-R) along with restore software in case anything went wrong. You could charge directly by bandwidth used. Hmm, interesting idea.

Re:One Danger of hard drive backup

[YoungHack]

> One flaw in any hard drive backup system: what happens if your system is cracked?

I've thought of that too. I like to backup my gradebook to another server.

So, you're asking yourself. What keeps the malicious intruder from logging into the 2nd server after perusing my backup script?

I used a little-used feature of ssh that allows you to restrict a session to a single pre-specified command. My backup script has only the ability to write new gradebook backups to the server. It cannot execute any other commands--it especially cannot overwrite or delete old files.

Each snapshot of my gradebook is encrypted with my public key (for privacy) and copies of my keyrings exist on the remote server (because it's no good having the data there if I can't open it in a disaster).

That's how I handle my really important data.

Dead Parrot? Fooker

[dominick]

I was duped. I went specifically to the article looking for the dead parrot joke. was this a scam to get me to RTFA? Shame on you, you bastards!