[PLUG-TALK] Back Up Medium Change

[Rich Shepard]

On Sun, 29 Nov 2009, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> The tool I support is dirvish.

Keith,

   I could not remember the name but knew it was something like this. Thanks
for the details.

> It is a wrapper around rsync, and rsync is magic.  Using hard-links and
> efficient data movement, it performs full backups of all my systems every
> night, making full images on regular file systems.  I have daily full
> images on my backups five years back (I don't bother to expire or
> overwrite them) and I could restore any one of those images onto a hard
> drive and boot it.  I used to do tapes, and treated hard drives as tapes
> for a year or two, but rsync-created images are so much easier to use and
> so complete that I would never consider using tape or tape-like backup
> tools.  Incrementals?  Yuck!  Unreliable and hard to restore from.

   Looks like a good strategy for my needs, too.

> For backup media, I am currently using 1.5TB SATA hard drives (I started
> all this using 100GB drives).  With about 300GB of data on half a dozen
> machines on my internal and external networks.

   I have about 267G total drive capacity currently installed, but use only
about 37G.

> I actually use three drives, and rotate between them for maximum
> reliability.  I use a Vantec Nexstar external "drive toaster" (only the
> single slot ones work right).  About $40. These toasters have both USB2
> and eSATA interfaces; I use eSATA off the motherboard (there are also PCI
> cards), and backups are very fast.

   I'm not concerned about fast because cron starts the daily backups at
1:00am Tuesday through Friday and the full backups at 12:15am Saturday. Lets
'em work while I'm not.

   I'll go look for dirvish and learn what I need to set it up here.

Thanks,

Rich