off-site backup plan

[JD Austin]

<http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/stephen_leacock.html>
On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Alex Dean <alex at crackpot.org> wrote:

>
> On Oct 20, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Matt Graham wrote:
>
>  From: Alex Dean <alex at 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
>
>
I do the backup to usb using rsync method for backups in a couple of offices
and it works well.
In addition to making a mirror it creates a tarball of the day before.
I opted to format the drive as Fat32 which allows them in the event of
failure
to plug the usb drive into any computer and get back to work.
The downside is that you can't set permissions like you could on a linux
file system.
They have two usb drives that they swap out once a week (an employee takes
it home)
it's been going that way for years.  We even used it to create a new server
a few states away to also rsync with.

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 before mounting it.
It's been working great for years.  Usually I pair that technique with an
on-site or off site backup server also.
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