[Discuss] Backup options

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2006-11-06 16:35-0500 Anthony Howe wrote:

>
> Hi Peter,
>
> We have run into the same problem at my work and are
> backing up to 250GB USB removable drives.

That's probably the way I am headed with regard to storage medium, but right
now I use a combination of /home backups to another hard drive (which is not
offsite, but is over my home LAN) supplemented by CD backups for my most
critical research data.

As far as software goes, I find dump/restore works well for backups. It can
send the backup data to any directory on any filesystem that can be mounted.
For example, I send the data over my LAN using an NFS mounted filesystem,
but of course you could send it to USB removable drives or any local hard
disk as well. dump/restore is fast, compresses well, has an extremely useful
incremental mode, and provides a verification step (which I think is
fundamentally important if you are backing up critical data).  The
dump/restore options are a bit arcane with some redundancies between them
(at least in the way I wanted to use dump/restore) so I made a bash shell
script with three simple options (dump level, mount point for the filesystem
to be dumped, and output directory to store results) to abstract everything
I needed.

> We have
> enough drives for an offsite, and onsite rotation
> cycle.

What is a good (secure/fireproof/cheap) place in town for storing
offsite backups?  Right now I would like to store a number of backup CD's
offsite, but eventually it would be USB removable drives.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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