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Advanced backup solutions

Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 4:03 am
by matthijs
Everybody knows how important backups are. Most people do have some way of backing up their files. I've got a pretty decent system in place:
- daily backups to an archive backup on an external HD (Timemachine), which allows me to go back in time about 9 months and find any file I had in that time
- 2 clones of my whole HD to external HDs. Updated about weekly.

However, I'd like to go further then this. First problem is that all backups are in my own house most of the time. If everything burns down, I loose everything. Second: having an archive or clone of files is nice, but in case a file becomes corrupted somehow, making 100 backups of that same corrupt file is useless.

So, do some of you have other solutions you use? I was thinking about having a form of online backup for the first problem. For the second problem I should have some system in place which checks the integrity of files

Re: Advanced backup solutions

Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 1:38 pm
by josh

Re: Advanced backup solutions

Posted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 1:59 am
by matthijs
Thanks, I will give it some read.

Seems like the rsync in that article does the same as what Time Machine does (create snapshots of the system files)

However, from first sight it seems a bit too difficult. I know I asked for "advanced" backup solutions, but I didn't mean "only for advanced unix system admins" .... Remember, I'm a mac user, I'm used to shiny buttons and drag-n-drop stuff :)

I'm sure that there are tons of backup solutions, some of them even good, which are also suitable for the average user. Now the issue is to find them

Re: Advanced backup solutions

Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 5:39 am
by josh
Well yeah the incremental is a bit involved and you already have that part working right? With APples' OS?

I would just use a "naked" [no special flags, just simple transfer] call to rsync, let it transfer the 'incrementals' that timemachine generates. Then I would probably just write a script in PHP to use the directory classes provided by the SPL, make a "flat" array of absolute filenames and md5 hashes, and serialize that or something

So basically I would just rsync the "incremental" files off-site, and would try to find an additional solution for file integrity ( could be written in bash or php & invoked by cron)

Not sure you if you need "out of the box" or if the previous link was just overkill