OT: Maxtor drive goes under

From: Kent Borg <kentborg_at_borg.org>
Date: Thu Jan 16 13:23:01 2003

On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 10:20:34AM -0800, Sellam Ismail wrote:
> Unless someone has a suggestion for something that's very easy to
> use and either dumps backup data to a server or a ZIP disk or
> something removeable.

I've been thinking about backups of late.

In my recent story the disk that died didn't bring any data with it
because of being mirrored in a raid 1 array. Cool, but I don't want
to get smug.

Backups are, in part, for protecting against hardware failure, and
raid 1 protects well against a disk dying, but not against the whole
box being lost in flood, fire, theft, lightening, etc. That is not
complete hardware protection but it is significant.

But that's not *all* backups are for: backups are also for "time
travel", for example, to help one recover from an errant "rm -rf ~".
Raid 1 clearly doesn't solve this problem, but does make a formerly
insane approach possible: How about backing up the raid array with
itself?

Use a (normally not mounted) partition to store historical information
about files. I haven't worked out the details of how to do this, but
if done it would result in a system that would be safe from the most
common sorts of hardware failures (a single disk dying) and software
failures (specific files deleted, corrupted, edited inadvisably). The
physical loss or destruction of the whole box or a low-level
scribbling of the disk (i.g., wildly applied Linux dd command) would
still be a risk, but those risks are far less than the risks of a
single unprotected disk.

For more robustness, if two physically separated computers can talk to
each other at decent speeds, maybe they could be mutual backups. That
would remove even more risks.

Note that using a disk to back a disk (be it the same disk or a
diffferent disk) is only sensible as disks get so big that they become
very difficult to back up via removabe media and are even difficult to
figure out how to fill up! (A 120 GB disk for ~$120? 120 GB is a LOT
of space. My ~measly~ 60 GB disks are damn big.)


Any know of a good online backup system for Linux that would work as I
describe? A simple rsync isn't good enough, I want to be able to go
back in time and browse for old files.


-kb
Received on Thu Jan 16 2003 - 13:23:01 GMT