[GLLUG] backing it up

[Sean O'Malley]

You backup solution depends on what resources you want to spend to do it
and how reliable you need it. What you are really protecting is time. So
how much is your time worth?  What do you lose if your whole system flops?
What do you work on that costs you time/money? And what kind of security
do you need?

The point is really more you have to find a solution that fits your needs,
each solution that has been presented has both an upside and a downside
and none of them are bad solutions. But you know your system and your
needs better then we do. Storage space costs money, and time to maintain.

Here I will present the "it worked good enough for me" solution and no it
wasn't perfect but it was about as cheap as you could get. (although with
one 1TB free email accounts, tarballing and emailing the tarballs might be
cheaper storage space nowadays.)

I used an old second half-dead drive (i had to thunk the drive once to
free the heads on more then one occasion.) attached to the system and used
a tar/gzip solution to copy/compress just a couple of the directories with
data and configuration files. Unless I was doing an upgrade, then i did
the whole system, but that required a lot more work since the second drive
wasn't big enough to hold all the data so I had to move the tarballs to a
different machines. When the drive did go bad, or I did something stupid
like rm -rf /usr/lib it only took like 2-3 hours for a complete reinstall
anyway. You copy the configuration files and data files back over, and you
are on your way. I only did the backup manually, and which was like once a
month, depending on how much stuff I had changed.

I did unmount the drive, but that doesn't protect against a flaky
controller or a power surge type of defect. And actually this was to
prevent unnecessary spinning of the drive. Every couple of months or
wholesale change, i wrote it to CD just to protect against the drive
dying. (these came in handy once, when i needed to retrieve some files,
that I had deleted during a house cleaning session like a year before.)

The cost was about nill, since I was going to throw out the drive anyway
and it saved me countless hours more then once.

Granted I wasn't aiming for 100% uptime for the system either nor is it a
datacenter/enterprise solution, but it did work good enough for my
purposes.

Sean