[PLUG] Back in Time

[Rich Shepard]

On Mon, 1 Feb 2010, Jim Beckett wrote:

> Dirvish sounds like overkill for someone like me. Actually, so does
> backintime, and rdiff-backup!

Jim,

   While dirvish can take some attention and time to set up exactly as you
want, there are multiple benefits for "someone like you." :-)

   I've used tape backup systems since the mid-1980s, and once I got onto the
Tandburg SLR drives and tapes in 2000 there's never been a glitch. However
for my SLR-60 (30G uncompressed/60G compressed) the tapes cost at least $72
each, and I used 3 at a time (two for alternating weekly full backups and
one for daily incremental backups). Tapes last me about 4-5 years, and I
needed to replace them a couple of months ago. The cost and limited capacity
drove me to dirvish instead. I bought a nominal 300G hard drive and a USB2
case at ENU for $81, just over the cost of a single tape. I'm now keeping my
daily snapshots for 2 weeks and the Sunday backups for 4 weeks. That's
plenty for me.

   Since dirvish runs as a cron job, you can schedule the backups as
infrequently as you wish, and set the expiration for whatever time leaves
you comfortable. After an initial exact copy of each filesystem (partition)
with hardlinks, each night's run copies to the backup drive only the file
changes made that day. So, if I really screw up a file I can restore it to
whatever state I want up to 2 weeks. I've never needed more than the last
version of a file.

   Backups are insurance: we hope we never need them, but are grateful we
have them if the need arises.

Rich