Coppola Loses All His Data

Colin Smith writes in with an object lesson in backup methodology — once you have backed everything up, take it somewhere else. "Film director Francis Ford Coppola has appealed for the return of his computer backup device following a robbery at his house in Argentina on Wednesday. He told Argentine broadcaster Todo Noticias he had lost 15 years' worth of data, including writing and photographs of his family."

Comments

Re:More than one physical location

[1u3hr]

I make video DVDs for friends sometimes. Usually there's a few hundred MB free space, so I stash a backup set -- my email, and other documents mostly -- in a data folder, ignored by players (though of course visible on a PC). I use encrypted RAR archives, their encryption is quite strong and uncracked as far as I know. Also of course on my own DVDs, the latter most likely useful in case of computer failure.

Been there

[kbahey]

Several years ago, I had a break in. The computer was stolen.

Luckily, I have been using a tape backup, and the robber did not take those. So, I was able to go back one month with everything intact.

In those days, everything I had fit in the 2.5GB tape. I then bought a 10GB tape, and it lasted for a few years. Backups were simply a cron job and an email to tell me that the backup is done and to change the tape. I kept one tape offsite as a precaution.

However, life changed. I got a digital camera and started taking a lot of pictures. Then I got another one with more megapixels and started taking more pictures which are larger in size. All of a sudden, tapes were not enough. The largest Travan tape is 20GB native capacity.

Getting tapes for a home setup is a real chore, specially with the rate the capacity of hard disks is growing. Tapes cannot keep up, specially at price points that home users can afford for both drives and media. Finding the media can be a challenge, let alone finding them at reasonable prices.

To this day, my page on Linux tape backup comes up first on Google, despite moving on from tapes.

Because tapes are no longer enough for the size of data that I have, I now use external disk drives in USB enclosures, two of them to be sure, and a cron job to do daily incremental dumps, and weekly full dumps. See setting up a hard disk USB 2.0 enclosure for backup under Linux and Ubuntu Linux backup of a laptop using a USB enclosure and the dump utility (I use a similar approach for the server).

Although drive enclosures can be theoretically kept offsite, they have to be unmounted, unplugged and are bulkier than tape. So it is inconvenient. Using 2.5" drives may make this more convenient, but their price vs. capacity still makes them more costly.

What are others using for a home setup for tape and offsite backup? DLT? DAT? What?