[olug] Backups??

[Phil Brammer]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 08:55:32AM -0600, Don Kauffman wrote:
> Since my hard drive failed and I lost most of my "life", I've become
> keenly aware that I need a back up system. So I've got several
> questions. 

Been there.  Jan 31st.

> First of all, I'd like to do an informal poll and find out what people
> are using to back up their personal data with Linux. I figure this will
> be of interest to others as well.

Since I have more than one machine running Linux, I have a cron job to tar/compress directories straight to an NFS-mounted volume on another machine.  That at least gives me redundancy should my main drive go bad.  Also, I have used dump/restore in the past to grab a whole mount point, but again, used the NFS share to store the backup on another disk on another machine.

> Secondly, I'd like to know if anyone has experience using the USB Hard
> drives as backups to their Linux data and what that experience has been.
> I'd like to know what you had to do to get it working. 

I simply like to use another internal IDE/SATA harddisk.  Seems to be cheaper all around and will perform the same function.  Not as portable though...

What were my pain points?  Well given that my drive went bad such that even the mfr's diag utilities couldn't work with it, I was really up a creek.  I've normally been able to recover SOME data off of a bad disk before, but not this time.  I wish I would've had (and now do) current backups of /etc, my "downloads" directory, /var/spool/mail, /home, and my Web root.  Oh, and now I also use remote logging so that I can get on another machine to see my /var/log/messages file among others.  My e-mail is backed-up twice daily, both /var/spool/mail and ~/Mail (for mbox setups).  Another pain point for me was losing all of my bayes information for SpamAssassin.  Had to start over relearing spam.

Phil