Comments on: Backup Concerns: Building Process

By: sharninder

sharninder — Fri, 23 May 2008 08:34:25 +0000

I haven’t read the rest of the posts in this series yet, so I don’t know if you’ve managed to setup RAID0/1 yet, but if you haven’t and are still looking a solution, give LVM a try. Ubuntu does allow you to install the OS on an LVM volume and LVM should give you all the functionality you need. You wll also be able to resize volumes online with no downtime.

If you’re in for it, you can also try using opensolaris instead of Linux and use ZFS for the backup volumes. ZFS is super easy to setup and functions right away.

By: David

David — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:30:12 +0000

Yeah, I thought about that afterwards… me = dumb.

By: WTL

WTL — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:49:24 +0000

day_month_year? Wouldn’t year_month_day be much easier to sort (I use this)?

By: David

David — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 23:00:35 +0000

Chris – Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn’t support RAID out of the box. And I haven’t got it working yet. I installed an application that is supposed to help, and then I mounted the “raid”-ed drives, but when I copy info to one drive, it doesn’t get mirrored over to the other.

I really want to get RAID 1 to work… stupid Ubuntu.

Thanks for the Samba thing. I was just going to ftp the files once a week to a day_month_year folder.

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 22:37:55 +0000

sudo apt-get install samba smbfs.

And I’d totally just run rsync in a cron job on a regular basis. As for the RAID0, is there not a RAID utility that runs at startup before Ubuntu loads? Configure the array there, and then you should be able to mount the partition normally within Ubuntu.

By: David

David — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:17:11 +0000

JamieO – My old PC doesn’t have a DVD burner in it, but my new one does. The fact is though, I can do my incremental backups on it, but I’d like to be able to do full backups at least once a month. And it would take more than one DVD.

As for off-site backups, I am thinking of using the massive amount of web hosting space I have to backup my mission critical stuff once a week.

WTL – Oh, I am tracking pretty much everything for more blog posts here about the whole process… I am already ranking for NAS searches in Google. Hopefully, once complete, it will help bloggers, developers, and designers that have also made it to this point of creating massive amounts of data.

I am not so concerned about every file I create, as I have lost data before, and it wasn’t the end of the world. I think backing up certain files to my hosting account, which is in some data centre in the USA will be good enough.

By: WTL

WTL — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 06:32:17 +0000

Don’t forget to track your time you spend building and setting this up. I’m curious to see how long this takes to get rolling and working.

I also agree about ensuring off-site backups. Imagine how embarrassing it would be if a UFO crashed into your house while you two were out, turning your carefully backed up data into digital confetti.

Occasionally, I get twitchy about the fact that my backups are only about a kilometre from our place. Then I realize if the bank gets destroyed, I have far more serious things to worry about.

By: JamieO

JamieO — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 05:35:20 +0000

Does your old PC have a DVD burner in it? You could schedule jobs to burn a monthly backup to disc. You just have to remember to take the disk out and put it at an off-site location to totally protect yourself.

By: David

David — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 05:23:34 +0000

blog backups, images, photoshop files, spreadsheets, videos, audio, templates, etc… It works out to be a fair bit every month.

Everything together it adds up to a little over 4 gigs for full backups. I will be doing full and incremental when I get this whole system working, so it won’t be as bad.

And in making this system, I wanted something that would work for me for the next 3 or more years.

By: JamieO

JamieO — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 05:01:48 +0000

How much blog related data do you have to store?