[clue] linux backup techniques? [talk]

[marcus hall]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2011 at 07:38:54AM -0600, Mike Bean wrote:
> Hello, me again.
> 
> Briefly, my home system is almost up to where I want it to be, I just need a
> stronger backup method and to learn more about GPG.  (Need to encrypt the
> sensitive stuff).   So I thought I'd ask for advice.
> Current backup technique is a bash rsync script that just copies certain key
> home/(dir) directories to a second internal hard drive and a USB external
> drive.  For the most part I get by just fine, but I tend to hear lots of
> things that tend to suggest sensitive data needs to be in at least 3
> places.  internal, external, and offsite.   Plus I've been criticized for
> not having a backup technique that saves versions of files.   eg - edit a
> file, don't like the change, restore to last week's version.  However, most
> of the backup techniques I've looked at are either too complex to be
> practical for home use:  backuppc, bacula, or cloud based &
> propreitary(sp?)   Crashplan.
> 
> So, I thought I'd ask for advice how people structure their home backups,
> and what services/software  (if any) they use?
> 
> Mike Bean

I think that you could readily transition to using rsync-backup instead of
rsync to address the issue of needing to keep older versions around.  This
is a python script that sits on top of rsync to keep backup copies of
directories along with older versions, meta-information, etc.  It could
prbably drop into the infrastructure that you have now with very few
changes.

I back up to a USB connected drive from ioSafe, which is in an enclosure
containing firebrick & waterproofing.  It is supposed to be able to survive
several hours in a hot fire and a day or more of immersion in water and
still be able to extract the data.  This isn't off-site, but since
wildfire is the greatest natural danger in the area, it's a decent amount
of protection.  I do manually burn blu-ray backups to take off-site, but
that is a much less frequent operation.

Oh, one bit of infrastructure that you may need to add if you do use
rsync-backup is a script to periodically remove old backups..  I delete
everything over a year old.

marcus hall
marcus at tuells.org