[Gllug] Terrible weekend

[Alain Williams]

On Sun, Mar 05, 2006 at 01:21:41PM +0000, Adrian McMenamin wrote:
> I have had a miserable weekend - I added a 200 GB disk to my main server
> lvm on Friday and on reboot it failed - saying it could not find one of
> the physical volumes - it looked suspiciously like a known bug in Fedora
> Core 4 (though one that was meant to be fixed a couple of months ago) -
> but after 12 hours of struggling I gave up trying to rescue the system
> (there was no physical damage) and just abandoned FC4 on the box and
> built a new setup with Ubuntu.
> 
> Of course, I had no backup (this just me at home). Rather than have you
> all lecture me how this is all my own fault, what is the best option for
> a cheap backup system? I am attracted by the idea of using NAS and half
> a terrabyte of disks, just syncing in the small hours of the morning. I
> know that won't ptotect me against lightening strikes and the like, but
> in the balance between affordability and resilience I'll live with that.

Depends on quite how much data you have ... there is a lot of stuff that I
have that I would not cry too hard if I lost it, eg: downloads of stuff (source
& stuff). I don't back that up but I do take a list of all the files.
The OS I don't backup (keep stuff that you install in /usr/local), but I
do backup /etc. I do, however, take the occasional snapshot of the RFS & /usr.

Once you have done that you end up with a smaller set of directories that
you need (/home, /var, ...) I use 'cpio | bzip2' to a disk once a month or
so; I then do daily incremental backups (from the last full backup).

I have an 80GB disk in a usb housing (housing cost 20 quid), I copy
full backups to that. The usb housed disk I give to a local friend -- in
case my whole house burns down.

If the machine dies I just rebuild from distro media.

Oh - something *very* important, whenever I make a system change (new bit
of s/ware, new user, fix permissions on some file, ...) I record what I did
in /etc/Hacks -- that is great since otherwise I would not remember what/how
the machine was configured - tells me what 'customisations' I should do
after reinstall.

-- 
Alain Williams
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd.
Linux Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/

#include <std_disclaimer.h>
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