How do you backup your system?

Actually, performing incremental backups - or even disk clones and full backups - has always been a pain with Windoze. Data backups are somewhat easier with the backup wizards and utilities but there are a lot of details that are not discussed and which are often either wron or incomplete within the $soft knowledge bases.

My actual production backup systems: on $soft I run the old DFS replication (I dont run critical servers that require realtime failover on $soft) on the few 2K servers still in existance and scheduled to be phased out.

On Linux there is some raid for database servers but in many cases incremental backups with rsync work very well and cloing disks and recovering a failed HD are much easier on non NTFS filesystems. The out of the box - distribution - tools included in Linux are really all that you need (unlike $soft).
 
Quote from 64c2:

Does this back up a mac as well as a pc?
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Well, I dont have a mac test box .... but from what I understand the new macs are simply running their GUI - derived from the old NeXTOS I believe - on top of linux. I dont know which filesystem they use but if it is ext2/3 then yes, rsync will work - also works over nfs.
 
Quote from prt_systems:

Well, I dont have a mac test box .... but from what I understand the new macs are simply running their GUI - derived from the old NeXTOS I believe - on top of linux. I dont know which filesystem they use but if it is ext2/3 then yes, rsync will work - also works over nfs.
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Actually I think it's BSD with a micro kernel not Linux. rsync should work. It's a very good piece of software from the key Samba developer. I think you can run rsync on windows, possibly via cygwin.
 
Quote from dcraig:

Actually I think it's BSD with a micro kernel not Linux. rsync should work. It's a very good piece of software from the key Samba developer. I think you can run rsync on windows, possibly via cygwin.
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you can run it on $soft but I prefer not to ... too many issues.

Yes, I seem to recall that Apple used BSD. ..... BSD and Linux are very similar.
 
1. Use a Linux server as the backup server. Dont waste time with Windows

2. Put 5 hard disks in it. You can use less, but 3 is minimum

Use SATA drives.

Choose drives with different manufacturing months.

Choose drives of same size

Choose multiple smaller disks than three big 500GB disks.

But buy cheap disks..look at the cost per GB when price comparing.

Dont use Promise fasttrak etc. Just use plain SATA ports / IDE connections etc. Dont bother hardware RAID cards or fake hardware raid cards.

I like the 5 drive chassis at TID 2mxon

3. Set up RAID 5 in software (md) raid.

4. Create and use volumes in LVM

Setup samba and use these volumes on your windows box. This gives you redundancy. Dump data snapshots to CD-R nightly :) Dont forget to put dates and other info on the CD-Rs

Or better yet, setup rsync based backup with versioning (rsync supports making hard links for unchanged files during incremental backups) with CVS along with a web based interface for CVS.

Moral: Dont leave anything important on your windows box... If its important, put it on your samba server, a linux box
 
Quote from murty:

1. Use a Linux server as the backup server. Dont waste time with Windows

...
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Very similar to the configuration we use.
I simply keep nothing of consequence on the $soft boxes anymore and for people that still have $soft clients I only allow them to use samba ....
 
Quote from AK100:

Don't know if it's been mentioned before in this thread (it's a long one) but THE best data backup service in my opinion is;

www.datadepositbox.com

Get up and running in about 3 mins, costs about $0.01 per MB so 500MB costs about $5 a month.

Runs in the background so everything is backed up as you go along, never any need to worry.

Seperate or external hard drives are all very well, but what about if they get nicked or there's a fire.......
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Is there a way to encrypt @ 1024bit the files before the backup...otherwise why you are using antivirus and firewall to avoid strangers in your PC...and then let a firm to 'save' 'safely'your files remotely?!...:confused:
 
Just adding to my previous post:
They describe the security features as:

---------
Your data is stored offsite in our state of the art data center
All data is encrypted before it leaves your PC
We use the strongest encryption available
---------

Well, but who decides 'how' to encrypt , any password, etc...?
mmhmmm.....
 
When you register for the Data Deposit Box service you choose a password. This password serves as a seed to generate a much longer encryption key. This key is then stored encrypted in your PC's registry. This key is used to drive the 448 bit encryption that protects your data.

Also note that 448 bit encryption is a awful lot of encryption. Your browser protects your online banking information with 128 bit encryption. 129 bit would be twice as strong as 128 bit... So 448 bit is extremely strong encryption.

Please see our web site for more details: http://www.datadepositbox.com/security.asp

(A member requested that I respond to your questions)

Thanks
Peter
 
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