Do you folks have prefered backup utils and methods? ie tar or cpio, perhaps something else? Is there a beter way to backup, instead of tape perhaps to another Harddrive?
Tape is old, linear, slow, EXPENSIVE, and it breaks. Nasty stuff, no one should use it anymore really. You want size, get a 160GB for $100 ($0.625/GB), and by the way you'll get way more speed than tape would ever give you along with the neat non-linear access, real-time speed, yadda yadda yadda. You want an off-site backup? Put the drive in a removable case.
My preferred method: one old P100 machine in a corner of my study, running RH9. The system runs on a 1GB drive but has two 120GB drives in a RAID-1 configuration, on separate EIDE channels of course, and /dev/md0 is mounted as /backups. The system allows no access at all except for SSH and syslog (this is the central remote syslog server for the house). Of course, the usual precautions are in place against remote root logins, etc., and SSH allows access for only the user "backups", using certificates and not passwords.
Whatever I want to back up, gets sent to that machine with a simple "rsync -av -e ssh /path/to/files/* [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/backups/thisbackup/", or automated by adding that path of files to back up to a script that runs every night at 3am. The rsync command does not require a password since it authenticates via the certificate, and the files are transparently (and quickly) backed up to the "bakman" machine.
Bakman then rotates the logs of all daily backups using the following technique:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
I figure the odds of losing data are pretty darn low, and this is about as close to "zero work" as I can figure on doing. The old P100 box, by the way, was free, but the two disks and their add-in $20 EIDE controller were not. <grin>
The only catch is my wife's computer, since I do not have rsync for Windows 2000. I need a way to use Putty (more likely, pscp) to do rsync's job, but I have not figured that out yet.
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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