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Neil Williams wrote: >> CD's are *not* a reliable backup >> medium. Sadly this applies to both generic and branded CD's in my >> experience. :( > What is a reliable backup medium? Seriously, what kind of storage medium > is going to last for years into the future *and* still be supported by > the operating systems of the time. I wish I knew! > Hard disc space at home is cheap. A decent solution is to recycle an old > PC (386/486/Pentium1/Mac), add GNU/Linux, a network card and as much > disk space as it can support. If it can support two drives, consider > RAID or if it's too low spec for proper RAID, just a cron job using rsync. Yep, that's what I use for work. I have a debian server which 2 or 3 times a week does disk images of the XP machines. Because of Windows' file permissions being evil, I have to mount the share from the Windows machines and robocopy.exe to that, but it works well enough, backgrounds nicely and is fairly fast. > Yes, hard discs fail but if you have your data on multiple hard drives, > you reduce the risk. Multiple machines in different locations reduces > the risk even further. Yes. For our "not really really critical" stuff at work, I consider backing up once is Ok for 95% of the data. Two concurrent hdd's on seperate machines would need to die before it was unretrievable. The really critical stuff (accounts) gets emailed offsite AND backed up to CD-R as well. As with everyone responsible for backups, I worry about them and am always looking for better/economical/reliable and convenient solutions. > I'm lucky, I suppose, most of my "data" is actually source code which in > a free software environment means there are *lots* of backups all over > the place. My own code is in on multiple systems at home and in CVS > elsewhere between releases; released code is mirrored for me at SF and > Debian; email is principally via publicly archived mailing lists or the > Debian BTS; work in other projects is often done via patches sent to the > BTS - making source code public is a fantastic way of reducing / > eliminating the risk of hardware failure crippling a project. Anyone can That makes a lot of sense! > have a copy; every copy is a backup. What's more, public copies get > cached by Google, providing another copy. Yep, and other people like the archive site - waybackweb is it? > I used to make regular backups to CDR. Now I just tend to rsync to > recycled machines on the LAN. An improvised RAID using multiple machines > instead of multiple drives within one machine. It's not perfect but no > backup method is perfect. I agree. CD-R's have let me down so many times I cannot trust them at all. Although I've yet had to rely on DVD-R's for critical backup, I'm pretty suspicious of those too. Roll on the Holo-cube! -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html