[143636] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: personal backup
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Greco)
Sat Aug 13 10:14:24 2011
From: Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net>
To: khuon@NEEBU.Net
Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2011 09:13:39 -0500 (CDT)
In-Reply-To: <1313216735.4021.5.camel@Espresso.NEEBU.Net>
Cc: North American Network Operators' Group <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
> 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.
