Ray Leventhal wrote:
Hi,
I'm looking for common practices for backing up user data to disk. My
user data is all in /home. I'm also interested in what folks are doing
for things backing up os and configs.
Any pointers on setting up rsync, cpio, etc would be appreciated.
Pointers to good how-to's especially welcome.
Currently we're using Arkeia Network Backup (commercial product with
which I am in no way affiliated), and it's great, but with disk space so
cheap, I'd love to be able to take my current non-raid setup and find a
way to get up and running quickly in the case of some failures.
In a mixed Linux/Windows environment, I deployed a Linux backup server
and mounted users data directories on the backup server using smb/cifs
and then did a "local" rsync of the mounted dirs to the backup dir (easy
to run as a cron job each night). Further backups may then be written to
removable storage for off site storage or additional disks in case of
drive failure. I like rsync for backing up changing data sets such as
users data.
To negate the risks/downtime associated with hard drive failure, I
cloned the original OS setup using dd to spare HDs and locked them in
the safe. Primary drive failure would require replacement of the drives
(and a system update) and restoring data from the latest backups,
although there's no reason one couldn't run 2 near identical backup
servers side by side if the hardware is available.
There are simply so many different ways one could implement a backup
strategy depending on hardware available, what software you're
comfortable with, whether you want to script your own or use a backup
package, the type of data you need to back up etc. The *important* thing
is that you're comfortable with your backup procedure, it meets your
needs, it's performed regularly, it's tested and it works.
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