On Sun, December 11, 2005 7:23 pm, jon@dakota-truck.net said:
>
> Terrible Tom <SilverEightynine@aol.com> wrote:
> : Sorry to hear you've had problems Jon! Did you have backups of your
> : hard drives??? Please tell me that you did - I will not be able to look
> : up to you as the Geek God anymore if you didn't have backups...
Heh... I used to think that real geeks didn't need backups, that they were
just for people who were afraid of computers. After having experienced a hard
drive failure last summer, I now know better.
Sorry in advance if this message is too off topic, hopefully I can help save
someone from a similar experience.
> Unfortunately not. :-( I guess everybody needs an incident like this
> before they start doing backups, right? ;-)
You could have always taken the opportunity to learn from our experience. :-)
Here's a rule that I've learned: ALWAYS assume that ALL data storage devices
WILL fail, sooner or later. Come up with a plan to deal with that failure
before it happens.
> Actually, I would have done
> backups but couldn't find an affordable solution. The size of hard drives
> has completely outstripped the backup medium industry's ability to provide
> even remotely affordable alternatives. Probably the "best" thing out
> there for home users right now as far as size/price goes would be burning
> to DVD, but even a 250GB hard drive would require over 50 DVDs - it just
> isn't a viable option.
Actually, running backups to another hard drive is a pretty good way to do it.
You just have to be careful about how you have it set up and think of what
kinds of things can cause data loss, and how likely they are, and decide
whether you want to run the risk. For example, you *could* simply drop a
second drive in the same machine, which would protect you against drive
failure and accidental file deletion. But if you get a virus or hacker, then
it can wipe out your backups just as easily as the rest of your data.
I use hard drives in external USB enclosures. I like them because they're
powered separately from the computer, so I can switch them off when they're
not in use. Norah had the idea of using two, and switching between them at
the beginning of each month. That works pretty well. You could even do every
other day, but then you'd have to remember to swap them around all the time.
With two drives, even if your system is compromised while it's in the process
of doing a backup (meaning your backup drive is mounted and vulnerable), you
still have the other drive with last month's backups. While one isn't in use,
it can even be moved to another physical location. Not that we do that, but
we could. If the current backup gets destroyed along with your data, you
would lose up to a month of data, but the scenario is pretty unlikely.
> I basically figured that the best option would be to essentially set
> up a file server to "back up" my files to another hard drive.
That's a good way to do it. That will also avoid the risk of your machine
going bonkers and corrupting your backup. Chances are, if one machine goes
bonkers (kernel panic, blue screen, virus, whatever), corrupts its data, and
starts talking nonsense on the network, then the other one will still be okay.
I actually got a kernel panic recently while running a backup that corrupted
my backup data (which is what I get for upgrading the kernel in my server
without checking the bug reports first). Fortunately, the real data was okay,
but it still got my attention. One fubar on the server could have
simultaneously taken out both my data as well as the backup. That's what
prompted me to cough up the cash for a second backup drive.
I've been thinking of doing a backup server some time in the future. Here are
a few thoughts, take them for whatever they're worth. You might want to
seriously consider hardening it. Make it so that the other machines on the
network can't even see that it's there (no NFS or SMB exports, ssh access
only), run the backup process on that machine, and have it pull the data in
from around the network. If one of your other machines gets a virus or
hacker, then it won't be able to delete all of your backups as well. If you
have a network drive mapped to the backup machine, then it's pretty easy to
erase your backups.
The drawback is that you can't "pull" the hidden registry and other stuff from
a Windows box in any format that will allow it to be restored. The only way
to do that is run a dedicated backup program on the Windows box itself. If
you don't mind re-installing, then you can pull all your data in to the backup
server to keep it safe. Another way to do it is to export a small partition,
allow the Windows machines to write to it, and then the backup server would
mirror it someplace safe behind the scenes.
Linux machines can tunnel their backups through ssh, so it's not as much of an
issue there. I've been using rdiff-backup, which works quite well for me. It
has built-in support for running over an ssh connection. I just use it
locally, so I haven't tried the ssh support, but it looks pretty
straightforward from what I've read.
If you haven't already, it might also be worth thinking about physically
locating the machine someplace other than the rest of your equipment. In the
unlikely event you had a fire, or flood, or theft, then you wouldn't want to
have everything together.
My solution for offsite storage is to (try to) dump out a DVD archive about
once a year and take it to Norah's mom's place. I'm about due for another
one. It's a pain, which is why I only do it once a year or so.
> The majority of the professional IT world would scoff at that,
How do you think all of these online backup businesses work? (BTW, did Josh
send you that LiveVault video?) It's actually a pretty good idea. Tapes are
pretty unreliable in my experience, and CDs and DVDs are anything but perfect.
Hard drives are inexpensive and much faster. The main advantage of removable
media is that you can take it someplace safe, which is why you have to think
about how to mitigate the risks if you're going with a disk solution.
> scrounging parts and such from e-bay and buying some refurbished and new
> stuff, I've just put together a ~1.3 TB (after formatting) backup server,
> and have started doing some initial backups to it; once I get everything
> set up, I'll automate the process.
Nice! Just out of curiosity, how do you have it set up? I might get some
good ideas for when I decide to do something similar.
> I'm still trying to decide wether or not to send the hard drive out
> to a professional service to try to recover the data, but that option
> is still giving me a bad case of sticker shock. :-( (If anybody knows
> of a good service with a good price, I'd appreciate a pointer!)
The place we took ours for a quote was certainly not cheap, but they did have
good service. They didn't charge us anything for the quote, and even
recommended that we probably wouldn't want to have them do the recovery due to
the price. I can look it up if you wanted. If it's something easy, they can
sometimes get data back pretty inexpensively (although "easy" usually means
the drive still works and you just deleted your partition table or something
else they can get back with a sector editor).
-- Jason Bleazard http://drazaelb.blogspot.com Burlington, Ontario his: '95 Dakota Sport 4x4, 3.9 V6, 5spd, Reg. Cab, white hers: '01 Dakota Sport 4x4, 4.7 V8, Auto, Quad Cab, black
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