Re: [rdiff-backup-users] external hard disk backups - best practice

[Greg Freemyer]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 5:02 PM, Chris Wilson <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Warren and all,
>
>  On Mon, 17 Mar 2008, Warren Guy wrote:
>
>  > While this won't help you get your data back, perhaps a point that can
>  > be made from your unfortunate story is the importance of maintaining
>  > more than one set of backups. A second backup set would potentially
>  > allow recovery of data in this and other circumstances where recovery
>  > from another backup disk fails for whatever reason.
>  >
>  > Perhaps others can add other "best practice" tips they have, for the
>  > benefit of current and future readers of the list?
>
>  I rdiff-backup to two locations, one onsite and one offsite. Even if I
>  lose my onsite backup through some unfortunate accident, I won't lose the
>  offsite one. And it being offsite would discourage me from pulling the
>  disk out and sticking it into the machine to be restored :-)
>
>  Note that this would work _much_ better if rdiff-backup was not so
>  inefficient in its use of network bandwidth. It transfers about
>  1GB of metadata every day over the network, for about 300GB of backed-up
>  files, and takes 4-12 hours to do so.
>
>  Cheers, Chris.

Chris,

I also maintain a local and offsite rdiff backup copy.

But I only have rdiff create the first copy.  Then I rsync that to my
offsite location.

I have about 150GB of data I backup.  rdiff + rsync takes about 45
minutes most nights if there is not a significant change to my
dataset.  (FYI: I have a number of spindles involved via raid, so I'm
not slowed by disk i/o as much as one might expect.)

The bad news is that if my first set gets corrupted, then rsync will
relay the corruption out to the offsite copy.  My reason for two
copies is disaster recovery, not backup repository corruption.  May
need to rethink that based on this discussion.

Greg
-- 
Greg Freemyer
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