[clug] Backups

Nemo wombat at nemo.house.cx
Mon Aug 6 01:13:24 GMT 2007


Thankyou, this is a nice and timely reminder... I'm looking closely at buying a new sata card and drive in the next week or so, and using the available space to shuffle data such that I can raidmirror my /home, plus, provide a third partition to make rsync incremental backups of the same... (longer term plan is that the backup partition will be 10% larger, and on next drive upgrade cycle, will roll over to be one of the mirrored partitions with a new 10% larger-again new backup partition. :)

Whilst my media data is nicely seperated already on seperate drives, it's still not much comfort that all my bits only exist exactly once. I've probably been exceedingly lucky over the years, and some recent random data corruption on my /home (via nfs) has spooked me. (was never more than a couple of dozen bytes per file, across a range of applications (inkscape svg's, galeon bookmarks, jpegs from gtkam and gifs from wget). Fault appears to have been a dodgy NIC (skge driver) - no problems since replacement :)

.../Nemo


On Fri, 3 Aug 2007 18:59:03 +1000, "Adam Thomas" <adam.lloyd at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> Everyone please go and make a backup of any data you care about. If
> you have backups go and test that they have all your data and that
> they extract okay...
>
> I just had a fright after telling a new SATA controller that it should
> export each of my disks as 'single' volumes not even thinking that it
> might blow away my data. The damn thing even warned me. I tried to
> back out of the changes but it had already written them to the disks.
>
> Turns out all it scrubbed was the partition table which after running
> TestDisk[0] on each drive I was able to recover. Each partition mounts
> happily now and running tree over the mount point gave me a happy
> listing of all of my files so it looks like nothing got too messed up.
> I guess first access will tell for sure.
>
> I'm off to tar up my home drive and some of the other more important
> things before I try and build the software RAIDs again which will
> separate out my home and general files from my media files and give me
> the contiguous space I need to run those nightly backups I've been
> putting off.
>
> -- Adam.
>
> [0] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
>
> P.S. The backup I did on 2007-07-10 had most of the stuff I care about
> but that's not really very comforting.
> P.P.S. Someone write up a page where I can buy everyone a virtual
> round of beer for making such a stupid mistake. Google didn't bring up
> anything useful.
>



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