On Oct 20, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Matt Graham wrote:

> From: Alex Dean <alex@crackpot.org>
>> Now, I'm trying to make a plan for those backups to survive the
>> house burning down or some other total catastrophe.  I don't want
>> to lose 10 years of digital photos in an emergency like that, and
>> pushing all this data over my internet connection isn't feasible.
>
> 2 USB2 drives of sufficient size, rsync, and a friend who lives
> at least a mile or 2 away.  rsync the dirs containing backups of
> the important junk to the USB drives.  Give one drive to the friend,
> keep the other at home.  Every few days, rsync the drive you have at
> home, then swap that drive with the drive your friend has.  That
> way, you lose at most a few days of data if your house burns down.
> No net connection needed.  All you need is a friend you see
> regularly, or a secure storage locker you can get to every week.
>
> Note that this might be difficult or expensive if you have more than
> 2T of data to back up.  You can also use dm-crypt on the backup USB
> drives for additional security.

Been doing some reading about the state of SATA hot-swapping, and I'm  
starting to agree that USB might be a better option.

I liked the idea of swapping out the spare RAID drive, since then the  
3rd drive would always be up-to-date whenever I decided to swap  
disks.  With rsync, I'll need to schedule the job ahead of time, and  
wait for it to finish before swapping.  That's really not a huge  
problem.  Having the drives accessible via USB also makes them more  
accessible from other systems if disaster really does strike, and  
that's worth something.

I'm now weighing the rsync+USB drive option against cold-swapping the  
spare drive in my RAID array.  Powering off the backup server to  
change drives is not a big deal, though a hot swap would definitely be  
nicer.

alex