Backup solution for iBook, external hard drives, and more

Agaric, in particular myself, whose life is on a 60GB hard drive in this iBook, wants a more redundant, easier backup solution, badly.

Willing to pay to get this set up, and maybe offer the service to others...

back up my Mac to Linux RAID

http://sitening.com/blog/2006/05/23/how-to-backup-your-mac-intelligently/

Tyler Hall Says:

June 12th, 2006 at 11:02 pm

Renegade,

I’m running Ubuntu 5.10 on a 1.2ghz Dell desktop with 256mb of RAM. The OS is installed on a 40gb drive and I’m using a second 120gb drive for storage. The box itself is sitting in a corner of my office out of the way - my only access to it is via SSH, FTP, etc. I picked the corner it’s in so I could drill a hole through the wall to run ethernet cable directly from my router in the hallway closet.

My setup doesn’t have too much installed. It’s just the base system (no KDE or Gnome) with SSH, FTP, Samba, and PHP/mySQL (for a few cron jobs I run). I’ve setup the entire secondy drive as a Samba share.

Any other specific questions?

paul Says:

May 26th, 2006 at 5:26 pm

I think a lot of people don’t understand how to backup. There are really 2 problems you have to address, maybe 3.

1) HD crash. This is easy, just make a copy of your files.
2) Something corrupts your files. This is harder to address. In order to prevent this from messing up stuff you really care about, like pictures of your kids, you need to set something up (like Retrospect) that does not overwrite changed files, but keeps them and any changed files. This causes some problems, like your backups getting bigger and bigger, but this is what you have to do in order to have your data truly safe. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you have a picture of your baby daughter somewhere in a folder. Now every night, you make a copy of your whole drive. Now, let’s say that some virus, or a speck of dust, or something has corrupted this file. Now the next time you make a copy of your drive, you will overwrite your stored copy of the picture with the messed up one, and that picture will be gone forever. This is why you need a backup method that does not overwrite changed files.

3) Offsite storage. You really need to occasionaly take the data somewhere else. Probably the best way is to make an encrypted copy of the backup and store it in a different city.

IF you do these three things you’ll have a pretty secure backup strategy. We used to joke around that “if you don’t have it in 3 places, you don’t have it.”

Other resources:
http://lifehacker.com/software/backup/geek-to-live--complete-free-mac-backup-248943.php

Services:
http://www.mozypro.com/mozy_pro/comparison
https://mozy.com/registration/unlimited ($5/month)

Linux Journal, January 2006: Build a Home Terabyte Backup System Using Linux
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8590

Complete backup solution for mixed mac and PC set
http://techdigs.net/content/view/134/46/

Cost-per-gigabyte of home setup (implies Mozy cheaper)
http://logicalextremes.blogspot.com/2007/04/backing-up-your-data.html

Ubuntu RAID
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Raid