[clug] Neat Backup Solutions for desktops...

[Sam Couter]

Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net> wrote:
> For myself, I use BackupPC which is far from perfect, but offers a very
> compelling online "disk" backup solution for multiple machines; it is
> especially valuable that it preserves a single copy of a file regardless of
> the number of machines they live on; deduplication is worth a lot on a home
> network.

I use BackupPC too, I've used it to restore files after stupid mistakes
often enough that it's been well worth the effort of getting it set up.

The biggest risk with BackupPC is that it's very vulnerable to a
single-sector failure on the disk. The file that's corrupted will be
corrupted for every machine that has that same file, for all your
backups to the beginning of time.

> Finally, if you want tapes, or some equivalent of tapes, *nothing* beats using
> Amanda ??? as long as you are willing to delegate the backup cycle to the
> software, and simply instruct it on the requirements.[1]

My secondary backup uses Amanda and DVD-RW. I can't afford real tapes,
I'm interested to see how long the DVD-RWs last before they quit
working.

> [1]  An annoyingly large number of businesses can't cope with the idea that
>      you can't just tell it "full backup on Friday" and have it work, so lose
>      an enormous amount of value in return for that particular feature, IMO.

You can, if you run a second configuration that only does full backups
and only runs on Fridays. Or you can leave the tapes out all week so it
wants to put everything on the Friday tape. Not quite the same thing as
full control over backup schedules though. With Amanda it's best to just
leave the schedules to the planner.
-- 
Sam Couter         |  mailto:sam at couter.id.au
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/linux/attachments/20091207/2affef43/attachment.pgp>