Backups - Was: Help, my disk array has one dead member

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 23 Mar 2017 21:39:27 +1100, Karl Auer wrote:
>On Thu, 2017-03-23 at 11:21 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>> I backup all my data to external USB HDDs, this is better than
>> nothing  
>
>There are six principles in the second half of this blog post:
>
>http://biplane.com.au/blog/?p=359


"comprehensive – i.e. you are backing up everything that should be
    backed up."


I'm doing this.



"versioned – you don’t keep just one version, you keep a
    backup from today, yesterday, the day before etc etc, back as far
    as possible."


I'm doing this.



"frequent – if disaster strikes, you will lose all your
    work back to at least the most recent backup. Less than daily for a
    typical business is probably insufficient."


I'm doing this.



"out-of-band (not local, not to shares) – if you back up to any place
    that one of your computers can reach, and one of your computers is
    compromised, all the backups you have stored there are toast. So
    back up to a place your other systems cannot reach."


I'm doing this. But this has got a limit. Each time I at least need to
connect one of the backup drives with the computer, so a
virus, overvoltage etc. could affect at least this backup drive.



off-site – if
    your office burns down, you really don’t want all your backups to
    burn as well. Store them off-site – at home, in a bank vault,
    wherever – as long as it is safe and a long way away from the
    originals. Different building is good, different town is better,
    different continent is best 🙂


Impossible for me! Apart from this I only have one backup drive that is
100% ok. I don't have always the money to maintain several backup
drives. We should eat fresh fruit and vegetables, but at least I don't
have the money to do this as often, as it should be done. Not everybody
lives in endless luxury.



preferably automated –  because
    people make mistakes. They forget to do the backups, forget to swap
    the backup disks, don’t notice that a backup has failed, etc.


I manually run backup scripts usually using a live media and do not
forget to make backups, if they are needed. The scripts write the exit
status of dd, cp and tar, the tools I'm using, to a log file.
I "diff -r --no-dereference" important copies and after writing a tar
archive, I at least open the archives. Swapping discs not always is
possible, as already mentioned, at the moment I have more than one
backup drive, but I only trust one of those drives.

Regards,
Ralf