Ask Slashdot: It's World Backup Day; How Do You Back Up?

MrSeb writes "Today is World Backup Day! The premise is that you back up your computers on March 31, so that you're not an April Fool if your hard drive crashes tomorrow. How do Slashdot users back up? RAID? Multiple RAIDs? If you're in LA, on a fault line, do you keep a redundant copy of your data in another geographic region?"

Comments

RAID is not a backup solution

[M1FCJ]

Simple. Redundancy backup.

Re:RAID is not a backup solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs RAID? My hard drive is so large that I just backup my files in a different directory :P

(Note: this is a joke, but sadly, many actually follow this "strategy")

Re:RAID is not a backup solution

[hairyfeet]

USB hard drives are damned cheap and Win 7 has a backup software built in and that is as simple as "clicky clicky, next next next" so there really isn't much excuse for not having backups anymore. All I have to do is tell my customers "If this PC was to disappear tomorrow, poof, with ALL the stuff that was on it, would you lose anything you couldn't replace?" to get them to see how much stuff they have on their PCs they really care about.

I tell them to use a defense in depth which is really quite easy to do, use USB HDDs for their basic backups with DVDs and the cloud used for those things like pictures that are really important to them with the DVDs stored somewhere offsite like a family member or friend's place. Hell DVDs are so cheap this kind of backup costs practically nothing and there are plenty of places they can upload and store small things like pictures for free.

A perfect example of how well this works is a customer who had a fire last year, even though his house and the PC in it were burnt to the ground because he took my advice and was swapping USB HDDs once a week with his dad so they would both have offsite backups he only lost 4 days worth of stuff and even that didn't include anything important as he had gotten into the habit of uploading photos when he downloaded them onto his PC. He simply came by the shop with the USB HDD from his dad's, told me what happened, and in less than 4 hours we had him back to exactly how he was before on a new PC, with all his stuff back in its place and nothing he cared about lost.

So PLEASE stress how important multiple forms of backups are to your friends and relatives, as there is nothing more heartbreaking than to tell some girl those pictures of her dead mother are most likely gone forever because her laptop got trashed and she didn't have backups.

Time Machine

[anethema]

Apple hate aside, time machine is an amazingly excellent backup system.

It backs up to a Netgear Readynas configured in RAID 5. Hourly, daily, weekly backups. I've never lost anything thanks to this great system.

In linux I try to approximate this with BackupPC.

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

It is really an excellent piece of software, though no where near as refined of course. You pretty much only get daily backups though since the kernel in linux does not track filesystem changes so hourly backups would be very prohibitive.

Re:Time Machine

[Ash-Fox]

You pretty much only get daily backups though since the kernel in linux does not track filesystem changes so hourly backups would be very prohibitive.

inotify(7)

Re:Time Machine

[jo_ham]

I'll second this. I use Time Machine too. I don't have any fancy NAS box for it (due to budget mostly) - I just use an external firewire disk right now, and it has been used once due to a full internal drive failure (restoring the iMac back to the state it was in an hour before the failure) as well as the occasional single file recovery.

Most back up systems work well for full system recovery - Time Machine is not unique there - but it's the single file recovery tool that really makes it shine. It's very simple and intuitive to use.

It is totally "hands off" though - you have to trust that it actually is doing what you tell it to, beyond the menu item that gives you a summary of what it's up to (total being backed up at that moment, last backup time etc). It doesn't have a "show me a list of files backed up at x time" feature without the use of third party tools, so people who really want peace of mind may find that annoying.

Re:Time Machine

[digitallife]

This.
I have (and still do) use all sorts of various systems for backups both at home and at work, and Time Machine is by far the best. Completely invisible, automatic and smart. You can turn off your computer mid-backup and it just continues when you turn it back on. It is so much better than the alternatives, I'm surprised how little limelight it gets.

Perhaps just as important as the backups: it has a great UI to access said backups! One click gives access to a file at any date in the past you want.

Re:Time Machine

[japa]

Back In Time is a simple backup tool for Linux inspired from “flyback project” and “TimeVault”. The backup is done by taking snapshots of a specified set of directories.

I use it with external USB drive and it has saved my butt couple of times. Cases where I thought the focus is in certain nautilus window, then doing Shift-delete + enter in very quick fashion and fraction of a second later realizing there was another nautilus window with focus on some directory which is now nuked... As this is just a frontend to rsync and uses hard links, there is the advantage of the backed up files being available even without the backup program as normal files within the directory structure on the backup media.

How Do You Back Up?

[mooingyak]

With a loud beeping noise.

RAID

[Ash-Fox]

How do Slashdot users back up? RAID?

Can we moderate this article flamebait?

cron job

[ILongForDarkness]

My weekly backups: something like:

0 0 * * 0 /home/me/backup.sh

#### backup.sh #####
cp -r home/me/* /dev/null

I haven't missed a backup yet :-)

Re:I use...

[Anonymous Coward]

Amateur. I take polaroids of my platters and store them in a safe deposit box.

Backups are for the weak !

[captain_dope_pants]

Live on the edge guys...

When you boot up in the morning and it takes a little longer than usual, the heart beats a little faster and you think "OMG is the machine going to fail? My data will be gone". Or perhaps there's an electrical storm to liven your day up - "If that thunder gets any closer I might have to shut down the PC, but if lightning hits then everything's toast !".

These scenarios, and many others, all get the blood pumping in fear. If the computer /does/ boot or you /don't/ get toasted by bolts of electricity then the sense of relief is wonderful !

Try it - it's fun ;-)

Tahoe LAFS

[swillden]

I use a secure distributed grid. The software is an open source tool, Tahoe LAFS (http://tahoe-lafs.org). The grid is composed of ~15 servers contributed by different people all over the world. There are a half dozen servers in various locations in the US, about the same number in Europe, and the remainder in Russia and the Ukraine.

My files are AES256-encrypted on my machine, split into 13 pieces using Solomon-Reed coding, any five of which are sufficient to reconstruct my files, and then those 13 pieces are distributed to the servers in the grid. I run daily backups, but since uploads to the grid are idempotent, only the changed or new files are stored. I also run a bi-weekly "repair" operation which checks all of my files (all versions, from all backup runs) to see if any of their pieces are lost. If so, it reconstructs the missing pieces and deploys them to servers in the grid. The individual servers in the grid are fairly reliable, but problems do happen, so repair is important.

I get about 100 KBps net upload rate, so this isn't a good solution for backing up terabytes, and the occasional "surge" in my data generation (usually caused by a day of heavy photo-taking) often causes my "daily" backup to take a few days to run, but all in all it works very well.

Should my server ever die, I only need two pieces of information to get all of my data back: The grid "introducer" URL, which will allow me to set up a new node connected to the grid, and my root "dircap", which is a ~100-byte string containing the identifier and decryption key for the root directory of my archive. That directory contains the decryption keys for the files and directories it references.

Since this grid is all volunteer-based, the only cost to me for this backup solution is the hardware and bandwidth I provide to my grid (I provide 1 TB of disk and grid usage consumes a fairly small fraction of my Comcast connection), plus the time I spend administering my server and checking to see that my backup and repair processes are running. Oh, and I also contribute (a little) to the Tahoe LAFS project, but that's due to interest, not a requirement.

I'm very, very happy with this solution.

BTW, the grid could use another 20 nodes or so, if anyone is interested. There's a fair amount of trust required of new members to the grid, though, so it might take us a while to vet new members. The trust is required not because other members of the grid might have access to files that are not their own, but we need to verify that new members will behave appropriately -- providing their fair share of storage and bandwidth, and not consuming too much.

Anyone interested should check out the grid's policies and philosophy at: http://bigpig.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome. If all of that looks good, join the mailing list, introduce yourself and we'll consider allowing you to join the grid.

Re:shell script

[Ken_g6]

I just noticed I needed quotes around the bpaths variable assignment. Furthermore, my backup script has been broken since January!

Thanks, Slashdot, for making my look at my script!

rsnapshot

[Wagoo]

rsnapshot seems to work pretty well for incremental rsync'd backups for me. It uses symlinks to maintain the older snapshots, to save on total filesystem usage. It can do rsync over ssh for backing up remote servers/pushing local vital data to a safe remote location.

Local backup server uses Linux software RAID for good measure (5x1TB RAID 5 + 10x2TB RAID 6).

Don't forget restore, is just as important.

[goombah99]

Backup is only half the problem. Restore is the other half. And indeed that's where I've usually had the most problems. The third problem is validating the restore. You always worry that you are either going to overwrite something on the restore target or miss something on the restore source and end up in an inconsistent state.

Time machine is revolutionary because it is so simple and seems to be almost flawless. I've had lots of backup systems over the years including dump 0 but everyone has been plagued with issues that arose when things were off normal. I've cobbled all sorts of things like rsync and cpio but the only thing that comes close to working as flawlessly as time machine is a NetApp.

At work where I can control the remote servers securley on a closed network I am able to use time machine for a remote backup. But at home I don't have a remote server I can target for the remote backup.

TO do a remote bakcup at home I use Crashplan. I looked a lot of competitors like Mosy but settled on crashplan for two killer reasons. The giant problem with all these commercial backups is that while the incremental backups are simple over the net, the restore of a whole hard disk cannot be done over the net. You have to pay them to burn DVDs and send them to you. ANd that assumes you know what time period you want to recover.

  UNlike all the other methods crashplan lets you pick a buddy who runs crash plan and then you can back up your disks to each others computer. If you need to to a massive restore you just drive over to your buddy's house and pick up the drive, bring it home, and restore locally. This also solves the problem of the first dump being too large to send over the net as well. You do it locally then drop the drive off to your buddy.

Brilliant!! plus with crash plan you pay for the app once not monthly.

I've used it for years now and it works very well and it very easy to set up. All your files are encrypted so buddies can't read each other's drives.

The only flaw with crashplan is that it runs in java so you have this instance of java running 24/7 and not to put to fine a point on it: java sucks. I don't know if it is crashplan or other things that run in the JAVA VM but over the week it bloats up to 600MB to 800MB. THe workaround solution is to kill the java VM every few days. Empirically crashplan is robust enough to survive this and restart. But that's a really awful solution.

Re:Automated backup of NAS

[ColdWetDog]

Hello Kitty USB flash drives.

Drop a bunch in the parking lot.

Use Google to get the data in a couple of days. Latency is a bit low, but hell, it's a backup.

Re:shell script

[nightfire-unique]

Just a suggestion; you shouldn't delete any backups prior to writing (and possibly verifying) your new backup. Imagine what would happen if your disks failed during your backup. It's more likely than you think; it's a period of intense I/O. I've personally had it happen during raid reconstruction.

You might consider timestamping your backups, and deleting all but the most recent 3 after a successful backup.

Something like:

/bin/ls -1tr "$drive/*.tgz.aes" | head -n -3 | xargs rm "{}" \;

.. should clean up them nicely.

Re:I use...

[Chemisor]

That's nothing. You should see my butterfly collection...