From: Dave New (email_suppressed_at_lugwash.org)
Date: Fri 18-Aug-2006 09:07:36 AM EDT
I'm migrating to a system that uses Lacie 250GB external USB 2.0 hard
drives, and the Linksys NSLU2 (Linux/ARM-Based) NAS server. The whole
thing takes up the space on a desktop of one of the external drives (in
its housing).
So far, I have the NSLU2 backing up changes from the primary Lacie to
the secondary drive once a week. Next, I'll set the NSLU2 to back up
things like folk's home directories from their machines to the primary
drive once a week on the day after the primary-to-secondary backup
takes place.
This forms a two-generation father-son type of backup arranagement,
where the live data is on individual workstations, a weekly backup is
done to the primary drive, and then a week later, the primary drive is
backed up to the secondary.
With all this in place, it is relatively easy to add an off-site storage
strategy, by purchasing one or more additional secondary drives, and
swapping them once a week for the online one. The only minor hitch is
that the NSLU2 will automatically disable the primary-to-secondary
backup if it detects that the secondary drive has been changed, so you
must go in to the web administration page on the server and re-enable
the backup.
Keeping backups on spare hard drives is not all that expensive these
days. A 250GB Lacie drive in enclosure can be had for about $137 from
various sources. They compare favorably to the price of DLT
cartridges, the last time I checked, and avoids the high initial price
of one (or more) tape drives.
Active digital photographers have tried archiving to CD/DVD, etc. but
find the size of the media tends to be too small, and longevity (except
for the MAMA gold types) is questionable, at best. So, a number of them
have settled on a scheme where they attach one or more USB 2.0 or
Firewire drives to their system, and use them for archiving. A
cataloging program, like iView MediaPro can keep track of where all the
original files are, and keep thumbnail images on the workstation. Once
full, they detach them and store one on site, and one off-site. If you
are a professional photographer, it's cheap insurance.
As for the scheme I'm pursuing, the cost is surprisingly little. Each
Lacie drive was about $140, and the NSLU2 server was about $80. So
with two mounted drives and one off-site spare, the total outlay would
be about $500.
One word of caution, though. The NSLU2 NAS could best be characterized
as slow. The 100 MHz ARM that is in the unit is no speed demon,
although lots of information abounds that claims that cutting a link on
the circuit board will double the clock speed to 200 MHz, with no
apparent ill effect (I would believe that it wasn't initially running
at that speed due to heat conerns -- as long as you keep the server in
a reasonably cool environment, the CPU probably wouldn't get too warm).
Even at 200 MHz, I wouldn't presume to use such an arrangement for
anything other than backup/archivings, and I also use it to put all my
Ogg/Vorbis rips of my CDs on, so we can access them from any machine in
the house, and also store downloaded programs (Firefox, etc) there,
again so the download directory can be accessed from all the machines.
At the moment, my picture archives are on the Lacie drives, but I will
probably change over to using the dedicated directly-attached archive
drive schema outlined above for that kind of work.
All in all, this has worked well so far, and I'm about to decommission
an old K6-450-based homebrew Linux file server that is still running an
old (8.1?) version of SuSE, greatly reducing my light bill (and heat
generation) in the process.
Next wiil be my firewall, which has been an old Dell 100 system running
Linux-based Smoothwall. I'll be replacing that with a small Linksys
(linux-based) cable/dsl router, again replacing a PC/monitor with a
small box that runs cooler and uses far less electricity, and has no
moving parts to wear out or fail.
Cheers,
-- DaveN
Dave New, densbe Associates | [e-mail suppressed] | [e-mail suppressed]
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [WLUG] offsite backups ...
> From: Dan Pritts <[e-mail suppressed]>
> Date: Thu, August 17, 2006 2:20 pm
> To: "Thomas C. Knoeller" <[e-mail suppressed]>, Washtenaw Linux Users Group
> <[e-mail suppressed]>
>
> On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 01:17:19PM -0400, Thomas C. Knoeller wrote:
> > What do folks do for personal offsite backups?
>
> I rsync to my buddy's place in seattle.
>
> > One such solution that I am thinking about is Amazon's S3 service. I have
> > seen a script that will allow backing up of a filesystem to the S3 service
> > using rsync. All I would need to backup offsite would be the backup server.
> > But because the backup server takes advantage of the hardlink stuff within
> > the backuppc program, I am afraid that the 250gb of space I am using on the
> > backup server would get expanded out to many gigabits.
>
> Replicating backuppc repositories is difficult. You might get away with
> it with three or four machines but rsync does not like the large number of
> hard links that you have with backuppc (specifically, it uses extra memory
> for each file it syncs, and extra memory yet if you want it to track hard
> links).
>
> You might rsync the entire raw device your filesystem uses. This is
> possible but non-trivial, there are problems with rsyncing really large
> files as well. Might not work right with however S3 works either.
>
> For a small network, i'd suggest using a central file store for user data
> and backing that up offsite. that's the really important stuff. Or
> alternately, only send into backuppc the stuff that is really critical,
> and exclude all the system info.
>
> > I am also a little
> > afraid of any personal data getting put unencrypted onto the S3 servers.
>
> as you should be. I dunno what support exists in backuppc for encrypting
> the data store but it should not be too hard to add.
>
> You could work with filesystem-level encryption if you want to rsync
> the raw device, but i fear that doing so might leave too much known data
> for an attacker to do known plaintext analysis on.
>
> danno
> --
> *** Sent from [e-mail suppressed] *** http://www.lugwash.org
> to unsubscribe: `echo "unsubscribe" | mail [e-mail suppressed]`
-- *** Sent from [e-mail suppressed] *** http://www.lugwash.org to unsubscribe: `echo "unsubscribe" | mail [e-mail suppressed]`
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri 01-Sep-2006 01:00:02 AM EDT