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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?"
Simple. Redundancy backup.
With a loud beeping noise.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Can we moderate this article flamebait?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Amateur. I take polaroids of my platters and store them in a safe deposit box.
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).
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!