On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 12:19:49PM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > 1) a copy of the critical files (accounting, databases, spreadsheets > etc.) that are needed for day to day operations in the event of > corruption or accidental deletion and the like. These are just copies, > in my case, of just a couple of directories. I don't need long term > storage, just a few days/weeks of copies that I can refer to incase I > blow something.
Do you automate this? > 2) a system backup with a snapshot of the entire system. With hours and > hours of configuration and setup on my boxes, Id like to have > occaisional "snapshots" of the whole system. Then if I lose a machine > (hardrive crash, theft, flood whatever) or blow the system up somehow, I > can recreate the whole thing a-new relatively easily. In this case, the > actual critical data from above would theoretically already be stored > and retrievable somewhere (and usable on any system) and therefore, > these snapshots do not have to be done as frequently. Just whenever a > major system change happens, or every couple months to include small > incremental system creep. > > so for case 1 I'd love something offsite, like a dead webpage or > something where I can just automatically load these files and leave'em > for now. case 2 needs bigger storage probably and maybe something like > partitionimage with the files split onto cds/dvds and stored somewhere > safe. The infrequency of this case allows less convenient means of storage. I didn't write about it on my web page, but to accomplish the "whole system" backup, I have everything I have modified linked into a separate partition. For example, /etc/exim4 is a symlink to /home/ha-dirs/etc/exim4. This allows me to backup my entire system by only saving a dpkg --get-selections list and the /home/ha-dirs directory tree to my backup. True, it will not be an instant restore in case of catastrophic failure, but it saves a huge amount of space. I can backup everything important to me on 3 CDs instead of 10. The symlinks are automatically created, so on restore I don't have to manually recreate all that, just do a Debian install, recreate my packages with dpkg --set-selections, and restore /home/ha-dirs. Since I have a mirror system with the root tree synchronized every hour, it's not a huge burden. Also, this scheme allows me to use a network-RAID such as drbd with old obselete hard drives, since my /home/ha-dirs is much smaller than /. I don't use drbd anymore because I have so much redundancy, but I started using the linking scheme above so I could use drbd with some old machines I had lying around. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
