Welty, Richard wrote:
i suggest that you actually work out some requirements for your
backup system ("not so paranoid" is a little light on the details).
the usual concerns are things like this:
natural disaster (fire? flood? etc.)
man made disaster (theft? arson?)
power or network failure (handling this implies remote site)
archival requirements (do i need to go back in time?
how far back? how granular?)
archival usually puts you into tape. remote backup site generally
pushes you towards some sort of rsync replications solution.
be aware that you can't simply rsync an rdbms, you need to do a dump
and then restore or store the dump file as needed. alternatively,
there are replication solutions for most rdbms systems (for both
MySQL and PostgreSQL in the open source world, don't know about
Firebird.)
if you end up going archival with tape/cd/dvd, be sure to regularly
check the media to make sure it works. i am aware of cases where
the sysadmins made bad tapes due to a bad drive for months and months,
assuming things were ok because the system didn't error when the
tapes were cut. oops.
richard
Hi Richard,
You are absolutely right... I should have supplied more details.
My requirements are minimal. I have two machines (1 - FC4, and 1 - XP)
that I'd like to back up.
I don't need any archival on either machine. My primary concern is hard
disk failure.
FC4 box requirements:
The FC4 box is running several websites with accompanying mySQL db's.
The websites are all maintained under individual logins, under /home
Everything else on the machine could recovered easily enough, so the
only backups would be of /home and the mySQL db's.
I've gotten the XP backup worked out.
I use the Windows backup utility to a mapped Samba drive. (Which works
fine for me.) I do a repeating cycle of 1 complete backup followed by 6
incremental backups, done daily. Then I re-use the same files every 7 days.
In the event of a drive failure, I don't mind being down for a bit (even
a few days), but I'd hate to lose any of my content.
