[ubuntu-uk] Backup strategies: [Was Hard drive- Bad sectors]

[Alan Lord (News)]

On 17/04/10 22:55, Rob Beard wrote:
<snip />
> It is pretty good advice taking nightly backups (or at least regular
> backups).  I tend to backup more now than I did in the past, touch wood
> when drives have failed it's not been really critical stuff that I've
> lost.  I now tend to backup a lot of stuff like pictures on to my server
> and also onto DVD (although I also do put some stuff on DVD-RAM disc
> too) and I'm looking at probably putting some stuff on my Ubuntu One
> account just to be safe. :-)

I have a dinky little bash script that backups up all the important 
machines in our house, every night to another machine - uses WakeOnLan 
and ssh keys so no login passwords needed. I add 'rsync' and 'halt' to 
the sudoers file for the machines' backup users so no password is needed 
to run these commands either).

It runs on a low power server that is always on. In the params for each 
backup job I can specify both the src and dest machines. So in effect I 
spread the backups across various alternative computers. It sends me an 
eamil with some information about each backup job so in the morning I 
know if each backup worked or not.

It isn't perfect - currently it uses rsync but this makes it hard to 
recover from a few days (or weeks) ago. I've been meaning to migrate it 
to rsnapshot but just haven't got round to it yet.

Al

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