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Friends Of Bart
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Off-Site BackupsMy home computing environment now has encrypted off-site backups. I've had the system in place for many months now, but various things have kept it from being quite right. It now finally seems to be in good working order, so I thought I'd share it with you… It all started with a long-time acquaintance of mine who had his house broken into, and everything stolen. Everything…including all his computers and backup media. My friend was between jobs at this point, and thus had absolutely no off-site backups of anything. Every digital (and film) photo he ever took—gone. 20 years worth of software he'd written—gone. Indeed, everything he'd written—gone. Now I've always kept a copy of my digital photos on a Zip disk / CD / DVD somewhere outside my home. Unfortunately, external magnetic media with enough capacity to backup my home setup have been insanely expensive for a long time, and I just hadn't gotten around to doing anything about it. My friend's disaster was my call to action. I purchased two Adaptec USB 2.0 IDE enclosures and two 400GB Seagate IDE drives. (I'm not happy about the potential for common-mode failures, but it is a backup system, after all.) Both have cryptoloop ext3 main filesystems, plus a small boot partition in case it is ever needed. A Dirvish setup update the current backup disk nightly. The other disk is stored off-site. Once a week or so, the off-site and live disks are swapped. Needless to say, I feel quite a bit better. Dirvish is quite good for my needs, and is maintained by a friend of mine. It's a bit tricky to set up, but it's quite easy to recover from—often a bane of backup systems. I should probably have used a compressed filesystem for the setup, but I can live with 400GB of backup space at this point, as it turns out. I know cryptoloop is outdated and has some security issues, but it had big advantages for me. Cryptoloop is quite familiar to me, as compared with the alternatives. It is mountable by Linux boxes way back into the dark ages, so it will be recoverable. It was quite easy to encrypt a previously-unencrypted filesystem, although that's true for several of the alternatives. Finally, the integration with mount and other tools slightly eases deployment. The cost of my setup was about $500. In addition to its protection against malice, it also serves as an effective, er, backup device in case of drive failure, reducing my need for RAID in my home setup. Along with the UPS setup I now have working, off-site backups are helping me to worry less about my precious bits. (Off-Site Backups is also a Netrunner card.
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Reminded
I'm watching the recent Apple WWDC Keynote while not freaking out over stupid stresses at my stupid day job. They just reported some statistics that made me think of this entry.
Apple found that only 26% of all users have any sort of backup plan in place, and only 4% have an automated system like we're discussing here. Shocking? They plan to include features in the next OS X release to help.
Also then the follow-on I did plan on posting... yes, Windows shre backup should be a snap, and then consider putting Second Copy on the Wintendo machine to keep the share updated (unless the key bits normally just reside on the share drive, a rare case at my house). I've never regretted the very small license fee to know that, same as you, my wife won't be too unhappy when her ride fails.
Very nice
Very nice, correct me if I'm wrong but it sounds like all you need to remember to do is swap the drives?
Hey what about those precious bits on the Windows machines? Hopefully this would be limited to the game saves (it is Wintendo after all) but... do you have a solution working there?
Nice your whole world fits on 400GB, do you have any special protocol for the precious bits that will never change? I don't know what they are... perhaps the original source for that raytracer you mentioned today.
Me, I've got a lot of the infrastructure but no time to work on this problem, as vital as it is; I've got other vital problems that desparately need solving (heh).
PS: Cool Netrunner action! Data saved is eurobucks earned indeed
Details; WIndows; prioritization
Yeah, just need to swap the drives. Nothing special with the does-not-change bits; Dirvish handles them pretty well. The could-easily-replace bits, for example the Debian mirror, don't go into the backups; that's easily arranged with Dirvish also.
I'm telling you—put this one at the absolute top of your list until you get it done. It takes way more money than time, especially if you get help setting it up. And it takes all the pressure off running cheap commodity hardware and experimental software.
I need to get the Windows share added to the backup list. I think it's straightforward; just haven't managed it yet. Joanie would be unhappy if we lost the Windows partition, so I'd be unhappy too.
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