No Help Delagator Options

[HammaTime]

We've grown to respect him as .:no help:. and then this IT consultant's hard drive crashed and he lost years worth of data.

Of course, what is the first thing he reinstalls? COD UO. He has been a stealth killer fighting as "Unknown Soldier" for a couple of days and last night he was inspired by the name "Delagator." Give him some time and he may get around to reinstalling his spell checker and then perhaps we'll get to know him as "Delegator," but whatever he goes by, show him respect as he is one of the best out there.

-HammaTime

[ScrapyardBob]

No such thing as "enough" when it comes to backups.

Day-to-day backups I manage using a network share on my home office LAN and Second Copy 2000. (Runs every few hours, saves the last 8 revisions of any changed files. Files are stored in a simple directory tree that mirrors the original directory tree so restores are quick-n-easy. I could also use rsync, but that doesn't do the multiple revision tracking.

Source code, of course, gets stored in a SubVersion tree.

I'll fire up Acronis8 or Knoppix (plus NTFSClone) every month or two and image the entire drive. Bit of a chore on the laptop because I'll remove all regular data first before doing the image. That keeps the image size very small (small enough to fit on 1-2 DVDs). My restoration plan is to restore the image, then reload data from my latest backup.

Long-term backups are a trio of removable drive trays that get rotated to a safe-deposit box across town every so often.

Long-term archives are done in a similar manner. ZIP everything up, toss it on a DVD with lots of PAR2 recovery data (10-25%). One copy for the shelf, 2nd copy for the safe-deposit box.

I used to use mirrored drives on the workstations. Lately I've simply given up on that (relying more on periodic imaging of the O/S). I use the 2nd drive as a near-line backup instead. The servers all use Linux's Software RAID.