Best Home Backup Strategy Now? 611
jollyreaper writes "Technology moves quickly and what was conventional wisdom last year can be folly this year. But the one thing that's remained constant is hard drives are far too large to backup via conventional means. Tape is expensive and can be unreliable, though it certainly has its proponents. DVDs are just too small. There are prosumer devices like the Drobo, but it's still just a giant box of hard drives, basically RAID. And as we've all had drilled into our heads, 'RAID is not backup.' When last this topic came up on Slashdot, the consensus was that hard drives were the best way to backup hard drives. Backup your internal HDD to an external one, and if your data is really important, have two externals and swap one off-site once a week. Is there any better advice these days?"
SSD (Score:1, Interesting)
What I'm doing this fall... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've re-purposed a computer as a backup server, which lives at my parents house. It runs Ubuntu, with ZFS running over FUSE. Each night, a scripted CRON event will run zpool scrub on my storage pool, and if there is a problem, it will send me a text.
My MacBook Pro will use Time Machine over NFS over SSH to make the actual backups from my dorm/wherever I happen to be.
Commence CDDL/GPL/BSD Flamewar.
Easy (Score:4, Interesting)
I have an external harddrive attached to my Macbook and Time machine takes care of the rest. And my important document and photos I upload to my dropbox That way I have a local backup of my entire harddrive in case something happens to my Macbook and one stored on the "cloud" that I can reach if my house burns down. [getdropbox.com]
backuppc (Score:5, Interesting)
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Get an old P3 for free somewhere and load this up on it with a big disk or two for storage, put it on your network, and run it. That's what I do and it works like a charm. I went through all the options over the years, tape, DVDs, manual copying to a server.
Backuppc backs up all my windows and linux PCs. It backs up only what I tell it to, and it does both full and incremental. Sort of a pain in the ass to set up (I use cygwin rsyncd on the windows boxes, and regular rsyncd on the linux boxes), and it works well.
Only drawback is it is still on site.
Re:Do we have to bring this up over and over again (Score:3, Interesting)
i use rsync + samba on a linux box over the network with 2TB drives in a mirror (encrypted, mirrored with debian) for primary backup and have a LG Blue Ray burner for secondary backup. I get 50GB DL blu rays for $10 each from ebay (shipped from japan in 10 packs) mostly using verbatims. I burn two blu rays at a time with copies of the sam data on both and store them separately. $20 for 50 gig is not a bad bargain.
Tape can be unreliable (Score:4, Interesting)
Depends on the files (Score:4, Interesting)
For really valuable files (the ones I won't ever be able to replace if I lose them: my own documents, my photos), I burn a monthly DVD and drop it alternatively at my parents' and brother's.
For the rest of the junk (media files: music, videos, books...)that are very large but not that important (or easily replaceable), I have a large external HD to which I clone my main HD once a week. I then keep the Backup HD off-line until the next time.
Re:Do we have to bring this up over and over again (Score:3, Interesting)
rsync.
Ok, that covers the <5% of users who can set up and maintain a backup systems based on rsync. What about the other 95%?
As an interface to set up a backup system for a moderately adept geek with sufficient focus to set up and maintain a recurring rsync backup, an above average grasp of the layout of their filesystem, and the presence of mind to alter their rsync script as their computer changes over time, rsync is extremely powerful. For everyone else, it's next to useless.
Re:say what? (Score:1, Interesting)
Protip:
Use hard drives from old boxes. Hard drives typically fail with in the first three months or after about seven years of use. If you are anything like me you have at least a couple of 40 and 60 gig ide drives around that have served for a few years but are small and slow by todays standards.
These drives are actually in their prime in terms of reliability. Buy one of those USB devices that you can slot both ide and sata drives into for writing your backups. Store the drives in a reasonably dry place and they will be readable for a long long time.
Re:Differential + hard drive - online (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? I don't think you've looked at this very carefully...personally I use Mozy, it's a couple bucks a month, the initial upload took a week or so, but it was all backgrounded and I never even noticed (yes, you can turn your computer off, etc.). Daily incremental backups take just a few seconds. Retrieval is via downloading, if you just want a few files, or for some money ($50? I think?) they'll overnight you a couple of DVD's with your whole backup on it. So, it's cheap, requires absolutely no thinking on my part, is fire/meteor proof, and has unlimited storage. The choice was obvious, from my point of view.
Different kinds of backups for different failures. (Score:5, Interesting)
We must lay out the kinds of failures and goals of a backup to determine how best to back up.
1. We would like to protect against mechanical drive failure. This can be done with a RAID.
1.5. We may also want to protect against the failure of other components of the computer. I recently had a computer die because its motherboard died, and it took about two weeks to get a new computer, and the new computer was a significant upgrade so it had SATA instead of IDE. In the mean time, I needed my data on other systems, and when the new computer came, I needed to borrow a USB-IDE bridge to recover some stuff that I wasn't backing up.
2. We would like to protect against accidental deletion of files, file corruption, or edits to a file that we have now reconsidered. This can be done with snapshotting. In source code, to reconsider and edit to a file is fairly common, and is the reason why most programming projects use revision control systems. Other options like nilfs or ZFS snapshots can also fill this goal. This goal is accomplished more easily if the backups area automatic and the backup device is live on the system.
Depending on your needs, this goal may be counterbalanced by a need to not retain the history of files for legal or other reasons, and this should inform your choice of backup strategy.
3. We would like to protect against filesystem corruption, whether by an OS bug, or by accidentally doing cat /dev/random > /dev/hda. This can be done by having an extra drive of some sort that isn't normally hooked up to the computer. Tape drives, CDs, and DVDs have traditionally fulfilled this purpose, and this is where the use of additional hard drives is being suggested. Remote backups, via rsync can also accomplish this. For this I use git.
4. We would like to protect against natural disasters. For someone living in New Orleans, it would be nice to have a backup somewhere outside the path of Hurricane Katrina. Remote backups may be pretty much the only way to accomplish this, unless you're a frequent traveler and can hand-deliver backup media to remote locations.
5. In addition to any of the above, the code you use create said backup may be buggy, or may become buggy or misconfigured over time. Checking the integrity and restorability of your backups after creating them, and keeping several (independent) previous versions of a backup may help here.
You may not be concerned with the various modes of failure described here occuring simultaneously. For example, it may be unlikely that you need to deal with file system corruption at the same time that you regret one of the edits you made on your file. In that case, your offline backup device doesn't need to hold all of your snapshots.
Re:SSD (Score:2, Interesting)
Flash drives have the advantage of their small size. No one wants to lug an external hard disk around with them, and discs don't fit in one's pocket either. So what good is your hard disk back up system when your house burns down, is flooded, or burgled?
The answer is to use a range of devices - just because I have a 500GB drive doesn't mean that all data on that disk is equally important. I can use a second hard disk for most data (e.g., videos, mp3s), and then an 8GB drive (which costs, ooh, about £5 - hardly a "ludicrous" cost) is more than ample to store the things that I couldn't lose, such as my source code, personal photos etc.
Re:Levels of importance (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems to me that if you're unsophisticated, you should consider everything important and back everything up. Life's much simpler without analysing the compromises and dealing with their shortcomings when things go wrong.
If you have the space to do a full backup, sure do that. Consider also keeping another backup of the irreplaceable stuff; for most users this means the things within their home directory (and subdirs of it). It's only the semi-skilled who are really at risk; they know enough to have multiple drives, but not enough to ensure that things are properly backed up. (With real ordinary users it's actually easier since they usually won't squirrel away stuff they care about all over the place. Keep it all in a big unsorted heap on their desktop, yes, hide it on a hidden partition, no.)
Re:Back up the Data Files to the Cloud (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't forget Crashplan www.crashplan.com. It features cross platform encrypted incremental backup in three flavors:
1. Backup to a harddrive you have in your home network (or attached to your computer). Costs nothing
2. Backup to a friends' computer (encrypted of course) over internet. Costs nothing
3. Backup to Crashplan's secure central facilities. Costs money.
There's a client for Linux, OSX and Windows, installation is easy, backup is automatically scheduled and notifications are mailed when backup is not complete (configurable). I'm using it for over a year now, and it just works!
Re:Tape can be unreliable (Score:3, Interesting)
The tape drives are now a lot less expensive than they used to be for both LTO and SDLT. USB 2.0 hard disks are also a lot slower than most tapes drives made over the last two decades (got less than 2MB/s last time I copied 400GB to USB drive) so go eSATA if you can.
The 3-2-1 rule (Score:3, Interesting)
I heard this on a podcast somewhere. I don't remember which one....
The 3-2-1 rule.
3 copies of your data
on 2 different types of media
and 1 copy offsite.
Personally I use Macs, so my strategy involves Time Machine and an external HD AND a copy of Mozy for online/offsite backup.
On the LInux side you could use an external drive and either rsync, or any number of Time Machine clones, and for your offsite backups, you could use Jungle Disk to do online backups to Amazon S3.
Re:Back up the Data Files to the Cloud (Score:1, Interesting)
I just checked out g.ho.st, but it only uses https for logins and "state of the desktop". Not. Good. Especially when the whole idea of it is to have a common desktop available from any computer. No way will I log on here at Starbucks.
Re:External and Online (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly, amazon web services now has a import/export service, where they will accept your USB drive via courier and import it into their "Simple Storage Service" aka S3.
http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/ [amazon.com]
--jeffk++
Re:Not LVM! (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't tell us you're using LVM for critical data such as backups.
Why not? Such volumes are only powered up and mounted for a short time every so often.
LVM does not implement file system barriers.
Either lvm2 silently ignores barriers, or Kernel 2.6.30 and lvm2 2.02.44 now implement barriers: