Re: [LUG] Home server

[Simon Avery <digdilem@xxxxxxxxx>]

In our household we have reached a point where there is lots of data, mainly photos, on several laptop hard disks. Some of this data is not backed up anywhere at the moment!!! So I really need setup a file server / back up box soon!....  (or use the online options as Rob suggested)

Also, I am utterly *rubbish* when it comes to networking so I am looking forward to learning a little about that in the process. Also, learning a bit more bash (+?cron) to automatically back up the data from the various laptops will be good.  :-)

I forgot a few things in my list of what my home server does. One is act as a backup server for all the other PCs and laptops on the network. 

One that works well for me (and I also use it at several sites at work serving around 50 PCs) is "backuppc". I just copy a folder onto each target windows pc, which contains a cygwin copy of rsync and an ini file, and that machine is then ready to be backed up! I tell backuppc its ip address and it'll work it all out itself, reliably, and has a reasonable web interface to check statuses and even restore accidental files. It'll try each machine until it sees it online and if it's not been backed up recently, will instigate one automatically.  It also does any other linux servers, although at work I use a NAS in another building (fire safe!) which backs up from various servers a directory full of archives generated by "backup-manager". Naturally both are free and open source.

Using cron to trigger a script is also a perfectly valid method, but I prefer the likes of backuppc that not only do periodic backups, but staggered ones so you have a 'version' history of backups sorted by date, including full and partial ones - in case a file got deleted and not noticed for a while. One thing it does that is also very good is "pooling" where it combines duplicates of files, replacing them with hard links. Where this really saves * A LOT * of drive space is backing up similar machines that have similar software. Although my work server may hold backups for 50 machines, it will only hold one copy of Microsoft Word, One copy of Sage, etc etc. (You could argue strongly about why backup software that can be reinstalled, but IME with fairly low-clue level users, they save information anywhere on the drive and it has historically been useful to be able to say; "Oh, you saved that really important document \windows\system32 ?  Oh boy, it's your lucky day..."  Of course if you have better control of where your group saves stuff, this may not apply. :)

One thing I've found with all background (ie, automated) backup systems is that a single core CPU will generally be quite (indeed, very) noticable when a backup is running. Same as virus scans, but there aren't many single core machines around now even on laptops.

I have another backup method which is a simple USB drive caddy that fits PATA and SATA hdd's. Using old hard drives, I copy backups onto those periodically - but as this is a manual system, it's prone to idleness and only really a tertiary system. I then lock those drives in a fireproof safe and try not to obsess /too/ much about 'bit rot' and how usable such backups will be in 10 years or so...

Simon
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