backup solutions
 

Ok, I have a Linux fileserver with a 200GB harddrive in it that I use for storing a lot of music and video. Currently, I'm using about half of the drive... so around 100GB of stuff. Last night, after repairing the filesystem following a crash, I had a horrible thought... none of it is backed up.

I'm fully aware that I need to back that stuff up, but for the life of me, I can't think of a good way to do it. Typically, I'd just burn everything to a CD, but its 100GB of data! That would use up over 100 discs. Even if I went with DVDs, that's still like nearly 20 discs. I suppose I could go get another harddrive just for backup purposes, but that seems kind of expensive. Weren't tape drives made for this purpose? Does anyone even use tape drives anymore?

Any suggestions?

I use a combination of tape drives and a system running backuppc on it at work. (backuppc.sourceforge.net)

Tapes can be and usually are a very expensive means of backup though. You'd probably be better off buying an external hdd for a couple hundred bucks.

tape drives were made for that purpose, but the down side of tape drives is that the data takes time to restore, sometimes the tapes don't backup right nor restore properly.

I use other hard drives....

Yep, tapes have their place but unless you're dealing with a number of drives or need a rotation strategy it's tough to beat a backup drive. Just another internal bought at the best sale price gets you speed and redundancy.

Probably the most cost effective way to back it up is to get another hard drive. The external Lacie drives are pretty nice. You can then mirror the two drives, or just create some backup job to run every couple of days.

USB harddrive + rsync.

get another 200 gb drive and run raid 1? For the price of the drive you can relatively certainly guarantee that it'll be backed up. It's not usual that both drives go out at the same time -- and if one goes out, put in another in raid 1 :)

Not to be pedantic, but RAID isn't a backup solution - it's a reliability solution. That said, it's the backup solution I'd run, if I ran one ;)

One day, when I get a real job and actually have money for another decent computer, I'll set up a fileserver with RAIDed harddrives and have my other computers back up data to it -- and I suppose every now and then I'll have to burn DVDs off the backup server. Still, it's a real pain in the ass to do proper backups for a home solution.

For an office solution, you can buy expensive hardware and software and it's not as big of a deal - but there's no good solution for home users. It's just something you have to force yourself to do, even though it's an inconvenience.

I've not used this but its supposed to be a great back up system and easy to use
http://redpawz.com/

It's been a while since I've used tapes, but I have a lifetime 0% success rate restoring from tape backup. That includes restore attempts where I've only been a shoulder-surfer. I konw there are lots of people who rely on them, but as far as I can tell, they suck total ass.

I restore from tape all the time at work (both full and partial restores) from a variety of systems (Windows, Linux, Solaris) using both Retrospect and BackupExec. Tape is probably the most reliable form of backup available ... with the proper backup software and the proper hardware. So I don't just rely on them ... I've used them ...

Unfortunately, hardware vendors know that we "need" backups so both the modern tape drives and the tapes are outrageously expensive. Unless you want to use old technology and backup a 200GB drive to 100(+/-) 1MB DAT tapes.

Your best option has already been stated: another hard drive. How you do your backup is up to you. You can use a backup utility or do something as simple as copying the data over. I'd go with a backup utility because it can verify the backup after it's done.


Remember that your backup is only as good if you can do a reliable restore. You'll need to periodically check the backup and make SURE that it's good. How? Well, if you're just doing a straight copy all you have to do is pick several files at random and make sure they're OK. If you're using backup software you'll need to do a partial restore of several files and make sure they're OK.

Here's another way if you want to keep the backup seperate from the machine being backed up, not a bad idea. Setup a share on your other box, mount it up on the fileserver, and again, rsync it. Rsync will do incremental backups as well--so, for example, on my server, I have daily backups for the last week and weekly backups for the last month, and it only archives the changes, meaning all those backups are really only taking up about 1.25 times the space of the stuff thats actually backed up (if that makes any sense... basically, for each of the updates, it makes a soft link to the files that didnt change and only copies the ones that did, so there's only one actual copy of each file, and revision of that file, backed up). Then, set that sucker up on a cronjob to run nightly (or twice a day, or whatever).

So, to reiterate: USB hard drive on Linux machine + rsync + cron, or USB hard drive on other computer + shared folder/drive + rsync + cron. Easy, cheap, and effective :)