backup advice sought

[Alma J Wetzker]

dep wrote:
> morning, gang!
> 
> i'm beginning a couple of fairly big projects and i've also had hardware 
> go south on me in recent weeks -- first, when the power supply blew up 
> first of the year; last week, when *two* 512-meg sdram simms failed 
> (under warranty, fortunately) -- and i now must realize that while 
> neither of these failures has cost me data, there are hardware failures 
> that could. and i simply cannot afford to have my stuff at the mercy of 
> a hard drive that might decide to blow up any old time.
> 
> used to be, we all had nice little consumer-level tape drives and would 
> back up from time to time -- i still have colorado t-1000 tapes full of 
> OS/2 stuff. but since going to linux, which is both reliable and which 
> last time i looked offered backup chiefly to tape drives that cost the 
> price of a used car, i've fallen way short. i *must* remedy this.
> 
> and i don't know where to begin. ideally, i'd back up daily to another 
> drive with an independent power supply -- or something like that. if 
> there are tape drives or similar that are not insanely expensive and 
> that have a decent capacity, that would be good to know. i do not want 
> to spend a thousand bucks here, but i also would be well and truly 
> screwed -- i mean lawyer-grade screwed -- if i lost my stuff.
> 
> advice? ideas? things to avoid? 
> 
> thanks.

Two thing are cheap; CDRWs and hard drives.  I use both.  I do daily backup to 
a drive on a separate machine over a network and weekly backup to CDRWs.  I 
only backup data regularly.  Config file change infrequently so I am not as 
concerned about that.  My data is mostly small databases and reports for 
school.  It still all fits on a single CDRW.  I backup applications to their 
own CDR where I can reload if something catastrophic happens.  I run on a 
network with 9 nodes.  For something really important, I backup to several 
machines.  (Each machine is on its own UPS to minimize power triggered failures.)

     -- Alma

I know restoring from a total network failure would be quite time consuming, 
but I would lose little (if any) overall.