backup & low downtime for home network

[Robert Brockway]

On Wed, 5 Dec 2007, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> There will be no performance hit.  In fact there is a performance gain
> since reads are distributed between the two disks as far as I understand

Well "it depends".  For IDE there will be a performance gain for reads and
writes if the two drives are on different channels.  If the two drives are
on the same channel there may be a performance hit for reads and will be a
performance hit for writes.  For SATA the situation should be better - I
would expect both read and write performance gains.
>
> Of course raid is NOT a backup and never will be.  It is protection

Absolutely.  Too many people assume mirroring offers some sort of
backup-like reliability.  It does not.  Just imagine the result of an
accidental rm: both copies of the data will be deleted.

> against disk failure only, although compared to backup this generally
> saves you a ton of work in case of failure, while a backup protects you
> against corruptions and mistakes by letting you recover lost files,
> although generally it can be more time consuming to do so.

Once planned out home backups don't have to be time consuming.  I have a
cron job go over overnight which sshes to each box and dumps full or
incremental backups to a usd HDD.  I have 5x500GB USB HDDs and these are
rotated offsite periodically.

The key is _off site_ backups.  Keep backups of all your important data
and keep at least one copy offsite at all times.

The cost of USB HDDs is low compared to what an offsite backup offers you.

As to where to keep an offsite backup - a workplace may be fine.  If you 
work at home then arrange to swap offsite backups with a trusted friend. 
Be very very careful about encrypting backups (and filesystems for that 
matter).  You can't just "get the password reset" if you forget your 
passphrase or lose the private key.

Cheers,

Rob

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"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine..."
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