[Gllug] local backup solution

[James Courtier-Dutton]

2010/1/12 Martin <mherda at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
> I'm looking for a local backup solution. Every week there will be some
> new or modified files. I think it would be reasonable to apply
> incremental backup every Friday and a full backup at the end of the
> month. Does it sound right to you? I don't think the amount of data will
> be very high. I'm guessing around 50MB per week.
> At the moment it'll only be a local backup on a CD. We don't have any
> server yet. We're thinking of automatically creating tar.gz/bz2 packages
> at the end of the week and burning them on CDs (also automatically -
> cdrecord?). Obviously, a CD would have to be put into a drive manually.
>
> Any ideas or other solutions?
>
> TIA
> regards
> martin
>

With any backup system, one needs to be clear on the requirements.
What are you protecting against.
Examples:
1) House burning down.
2) Accidental deletions
3) Hard Disk failures.
4) How long must the backup last for.
5) Virus infections or cracked systems.
6) Others...

(1) requires some sort of off site backup.
LVM and snapshots can take care of (2). No separate backup media needed.
Mirroring can take care of (3).
(4) this depends on the type of data being backup
(5) is a difficult one. How to ensure that the backup media is not infected.

I would recommend network backup methods whereever you can, and resort
to external media only when you have to.
For example, for home I have my laptop. I backup this using rsync over
ssh over the internet to a desktop PC I have left at my parents house.
Some vital data, such as photos, I have also stored on USB memory
sticks, with a sha256 checksum on them, so that I can tell easily if
any of them have become corrupted in any way, and replace them with a
good backup.
USB memory sticks last a long time and don't suffer when scratched.

Kind Regards

James
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