Re: personal backup

[David Ramsey <dmr () ramseyfamily org>]

When my parents finally got broadband years ago and I wired their house, I
loaded Linux on an old x86 PC and stashed it in a corner of their garage.

rsync over an ssh tunnel runs nightly from a Linux server in my house (about
90 miles away) to theirs.  I don't sync everything, but it gives me comfort
knowing that my family photos and such are secure somewhere else.  It gives
the added advantage of letting them browse our family photo archive locally.

David Ramsey
Charlotte, NC


On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Joe Greco <jgreco () ns sol net> wrote:

> > On Sat, 2011-08-13 at 14:12 +0900, Randy Bush wrote:
> > > charles skipped what i see as a highly critical question, personal
> > > backup.
> >
> > Very good point.
> >
> > For my laptops, nearline field storage includes my laptop's drive and a
> > portable external drive. Online and nearline home storage is a network
> > attached storage array running proprietary X-RAID (like RAID-5) with a
> > hot-spare drive. All my machines (desktops, servers and laptops) are set
> > to perform regular backups to the NAS. Offline backups are done to a
> > series of external USB HDs that are rotated into place for nightly
> > incremental and weekly full backups. Current retention schema is 4 weeks
> > of backups with a one week offsite physical rotation (performed monthly
> > to a safety deposit box).  I'm at the moment trying to figure out a good
> > way for doing streaming backups to an offsite DC.
>
> 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.  :-)  On the other hand, running Unison to a server someplace
> else has obvious benefits and some downsides too.  Backups remain a
> tricky problem to get right.
>
> ... JG
> --
> Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
> "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then
> I
> won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail
> spam(CNN)
> With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many
> apples.