Does anyone have experience with Drobo (http://drobo.com/)?
I've been thinking of getting one, but the price tag has me hesitating.
Jwz's guide to backups: "Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway."
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Re: Jwz's guide to backups: "Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway."
#12And for those of us for whom "D'oh, I deleted that!", or "Nooooo....I overwrote that file yesterday!" is more of a danger than "My house just burned down", I strongly recommend rdiff-backup: http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/ It's short, sweet, incremental - and, because it uses diffs, not just hardlinks and new files, it doesn't use an extra 500MB each time you add 2k to the end of a 500MB dataset.
This question doesn't seem to be addressed on the rdiff-backup site, and is the main advantage of the posted solution: How much time do you waste getting a system with a dead main disk back online?
Regardless of your backup strategy, you're going to have to replace the physical disk. If the disk you are backing up to is compatible with the broken disk, you 1) already have a disk to put in your computer, and 2) you can already boot off it. So the time wasted is the absolute minimum.
Even for people using rdiff, it's probably best to have a ready-to-go backup as described in the article. His recommendation of having a bootable backup is still valid, and is not limited to the "My house just burned down" case. That's what the third disk is for :-)
Re: Jwz's guide to backups: "Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway."
#13If you want to have more than one version of your backup, rsync gained support for that somewhere in the past few years.
You want to look at the "--link-dest" option. Essentially you can keep parallel trees of backups but they use hardlinks to share unchanged files. In practice, backing up web/mail/misc servers I find each extra copy I keep takes about 5% of the first copy's space. rdiff-backup is more space efficient, but 5% isn't much and this is simpler.
If you name the backup trees after the day of the week you don't even have to worry about rotating names and purging old trees, they just overwrite.
(note: you lose the ability to just flop the drive back into the original machine. But I wouldn't do that anyway. I'd use the opportunity for a clean install.)
Re: Jwz's guide to backups: "Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway."
#14Does anyone have experience with Drobo ( http://drobo.com/ )? I've been thinking of getting one, but the price tag has me hesitating.
Drobo is great. I have one sitting next to me with 4 x 1TB drives in it and it works exactly as advertised.
Re: Jwz's guide to backups: "Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway."
#15I've been using SpiderOak (http://spideroak.com) to backup my code daily. Upload to their server. Nice simple gui interface. And it's free for < 2GB. And it works for Linux (unlike DropBox ;)
Re: Jwz's guide to backups: "Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway."
#16I've had good results backing up to S3 with Brackup: http://search.cpan.org/~bradfitz/Brackup/
It optionally encrypts data, though. I don't do that, because encrypting backups seems like playing with fire to me. What if you lose the private key? Now you have two problems.
Re: Jwz's guide to backups: "Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway."
#17I've had good results backing up to S3 with Brackup: http://search.cpan.org/~bradfitz/Brackup/ It optionally encrypts data, though. I don't do that, because encrypting backups seems like playing with fire to me. What if you lose the private key? Now you have two problems.
You should use a passphrase, not a private key. Just use a passphrase that you're not going to forget, or write it down and put it in a safe deposit box. (The only people you are trying to protect your data from are people that work for Amazon. They don't have access to your house, so writing down the password isn't a security problem.)
Re: Jwz's guide to backups: "Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway."
#18If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself. This is what happens when someone who knows what they're doing, rather than a journalist, writes an article ;-)
I'm liking this community less and less each day. When this sort of comment on this sort of article is the top comment something is wrong. For some reason I don't seem to be able to vote that comment down either.
Re: Jwz's guide to backups: "Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway."
#19If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself. This is what happens when someone who knows what they're doing, rather than a journalist, writes an article ;-)
I'm liking this community less and less each day. When this sort of comment on this sort of article is the top comment something is wrong. For some reason I don't seem to be able to vote that comment down either.
My comment was just that; a comment. What would be worth voting down would be the original /article/ for making such a statement, rather than an observation that the statement was made.
I must agree with you, however, that I cannot figure out why my flippant observation got voted up, but this is not the fault of the comment.
Re: Jwz's guide to backups: "Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway."
#20If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself. This is what happens when someone who knows what they're doing, rather than a journalist, writes an article ;-)
I'm liking this community less and less each day. When this sort of comment on this sort of article is the top comment something is wrong. For some reason I don't seem to be able to vote that comment down either.
The down arrow disappears after a period of time. Probably a day or so.