[ale] Personal Backup Strategies?

[Geoffrey]

Jim Kinney wrote:
> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan loaded with back up tapes!

You know, the original of that is:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with back up 
tapes!

Originally coined prior to the minivan era...

> 
> Once the cost of a tape drive pair, one stored off site for fire 
> protection, is choked down, local and off site backups become much easier.
> 
> Park a cheap system with a big raid 1 at a friends with good bandwidth 
> and rsync at night. Set up a box for the friend at your place.
> 
>> On Feb 3, 2010 11:24 AM, "David Tomaschik" <david at tuxteam.com 
>> <mailto:david at tuxteam.com>> wrote:
>>
>> I've looked through some of the archives, but I was hoping to get a 
>> better take on people's personal backup strategies. I have about 200GB 
>> of data that needs to be protected.  This includes personal projects, 
>> academic work, email archives, photos, home videos, and other data 
>> that cannot readily be replaced.  Lately, however, this is growing at 
>> a rate of ~50GB/year, so expansion is obviously an important point 
>> (thank you video cameras and 10MP stills).  I am significantly less 
>> concerned about anything that can be replaced (e.g., videos of talks 
>> at conferences that I have downloaded).  I see 3 categories of 
>> predominant threat when it comes to backups, with increasing levels of 
>> backup required to protect against them.
>>
>> 1) File system corruption/accidental deletion -- external backup drive 
>> should be sufficient.
>>
>> 2) Hard drive failure -- RAID 1?
>>
>> 3) Burglary/theft/fire/flood -- I am assuming here that my entire 
>> residence is a loss.  This means some sort of off-site backup.
>>
>> Currently, I have a 500GB and a 1TB Hard drive in my computer.  The 
>> 1TB uses LVM and has a 300GB LUKS-encrypted partition for 
>> /home/david.  All of the important data is within this partition.  
>> Excluding photo and video, I would like to ensure that any backup 
>> strategy writes this data to media in an encrypted form.  My current 
>> backup strategy is pretty much an external (USB 2.0) 1TB HDD that's 
>> also encrypted with LUKS and is rsync-ed from my home.  It's then 
>> placed in a fire-resistant lockbox.  Of course, such lockboxes are no 
>> guarantee in a fire, and both my desktop and the lockbox are likely 
>> targets in the event of theft.
>>
>> What strategies are there to better protect myself?  Optical media 
>> seems nearly impossible given the sizes involved (unless I invest in 
>> blu-ray, but the media there is still very expensive).  Additional 
>> hard drive (encrypted) locked in my desk at work?  (Which makes me 
>> wonder how well hard drives would stand up to frequent trips in the 
>> car.)  I can only imagine network backups over my cable modem, and the 
>> cost of 200+ GB of network storage.
>>
>> -- 
>> David Tomaschik, RHCE
>> System Administrator/Developer
>> http://tuxteam.com
>> GPG: 0x6D428695
>>
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-- 
Until later, Geoffrey

"I predict future happiness for America if they can prevent
the government from wasting the labors of the people under
the pretense of taking care of them."
- Thomas Jefferson