[Gllug] Unattended backup solution

[Tony]

On 8/12/05, Paul Kathro <Paul at kathro.com> wrote:
> 
> Also, any other backup media I should be considering here?
> 

Don't underestimate the value of a pile of ide drives in caddies, rsync, and 
an old pc that you wouldn't deem fit for a desktop user anymore. Consider 
the drives like you would tapes - rotate them in just the same way. Downside 
is that you will probably need to power down the pc to change the caddy- ide 
doesn't hotswap. Upsides are that once the drives are populated with data, 
rsync is wonderfully efficient, so your backup run times are relatively 
short- yet you have a full clean backup- not an incremental or a 
differential. Recovering individual files can be very quick- no waiting to 
spool the tape to the right place, and then hoping the tape hasn't just gone 
defective since the last verify - of course drives can fail too, but somehow 
I trust them more than tapes. Offsite backups/disaster recovery - you can 
plug ide drives into pretty well any pc on the planet- won't need to go 
quickly finding a supplier of tape drive that can read the right tapes. I 
have even recovered a server by removing the failed drive, installing and 
mounting the previous night's backup drive and then symlinking to the actual 
backup folder of the failed drive - that was a very quick recovery of 200+GB 
of data. First thing I did after that was run a new rsync job, so I had 
another up-to-date backup.

There may be good reasons why this isn't for you- but at least have a think 
about it.

Cheers,

Tony
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