[ale] Personal Backup Strategies?

[Jim Kinney]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan loaded with back up tapes!

Once the cost of a tape drive pair, one stored off site for fire protection,
is choked down, local and off site backups become much easier.

Park a cheap system with a big raid 1 at a friends with good bandwidth and
rsync at night. Set up a box for the friend at your place.

On Feb 3, 2010 11:24 AM, "David Tomaschik" <david at tuxteam.com> wrote:

I've looked through some of the archives, but I was hoping to get a better
take on people's personal backup strategies. I have about 200GB of data that
needs to be protected.  This includes personal projects, academic work,
email archives, photos, home videos, and other data that cannot readily be
replaced.  Lately, however, this is growing at a rate of ~50GB/year, so
expansion is obviously an important point (thank you video cameras and 10MP
stills).  I am significantly less concerned about anything that can be
replaced (e.g., videos of talks at conferences that I have downloaded).  I
see 3 categories of predominant threat when it comes to backups, with
increasing levels of backup required to protect against them.

1) File system corruption/accidental deletion -- external backup drive
should be sufficient.

2) Hard drive failure -- RAID 1?

3) Burglary/theft/fire/flood -- I am assuming here that my entire residence
is a loss.  This means some sort of off-site backup.

Currently, I have a 500GB and a 1TB Hard drive in my computer.  The 1TB uses
LVM and has a 300GB LUKS-encrypted partition for /home/david.  All of the
important data is within this partition.  Excluding photo and video, I would
like to ensure that any backup strategy writes this data to media in an
encrypted form.  My current backup strategy is pretty much an external (USB
2.0) 1TB HDD that's also encrypted with LUKS and is rsync-ed from my home.
It's then placed in a fire-resistant lockbox.  Of course, such lockboxes are
no guarantee in a fire, and both my desktop and the lockbox are likely
targets in the event of theft.

What strategies are there to better protect myself?  Optical media seems
nearly impossible given the sizes involved (unless I invest in blu-ray, but
the media there is still very expensive).  Additional hard drive (encrypted)
locked in my desk at work?  (Which makes me wonder how well hard drives
would stand up to frequent trips in the car.)  I can only imagine network
backups over my cable modem, and the cost of 200+ GB of network storage.

-- 
David Tomaschik, RHCE
System Administrator/Developer
http://tuxteam.com
GPG: 0x6D428695

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