off-site backup plan

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 09:22 -0700, Matt Graham wrote:
> From: JD Austin <jd at twingeckos.com>
> > On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Matt Graham wrote:
> >> From: JD Austin <jd at twingeckos.com>
> >>> One gotcha is that depending on where they plug it in it can be
> >>> sda, sdc, sdd etc.  I wrote a script to figure out where it is
> >> *Wrote a script*?
> >>
> >> /dev/disk/by-id/ , /dev/disk/by-uuid/ , and the -L option to
> >> mount are probably better solutions for that.
> > Tried that.. doesn't work with Fat32 drives :)
> 
> machine:~$ grep bigred /etc/fstab
> LABEL=bigred  /mnt/bigred       vfat    user,noauto,umask=000   0  0
> machine:~$ mount /mnt/bigred
> machine:~$
> 
> ...just because there's no tune2fs -L for FAT doesn't mean it can't
> be done.  The label for FAT starts at byte 71 of the partition and
> goes for 11 bytes.  echo -n 'string' | dd of=/dev/sdX1 bs=1 seek=71
> and you've got a FAT label on /dev/sdX1.
> 
> /dev/disk/by-id/ is also not dependent on whatever filesystem is on
> the disk or partition.
----
a 'backup' of an ext3 filesystem to a vfat filesystem can't really be
considered a backup but rather a copy since there really isn't much hope
for 'restore' 

I have never seen the practicality of hard drive backups with removable
drives. It's always the human element because given any other options,
humans will fail. It's entirely predictable. Sure they will commit to
getting it done and perhaps succeed every day for the first year or so,
but...

Craig


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