[Leaplist] 2.5" disk is taking over: $0.18/GB for 5400, $0.22/GB for 7200 ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 9/28/08, Damien McKenna <damien at mc-kenna.com> wrote:
> So what do you recommend for someone with a laptop

Rsync.  I rsync my home directories.  I do it on the road.
I do it when connected into the LAN at home.

> and desktop (multiple OSes)

Windows is more of a PITA.  To "tame" it, I do the following:  

1.  Small C: (32GiB, 4096/63/255 cyl/sec/hds) "dd"
2.  Remaining D:, including Pagefile, TMP/TEMP, etc...
3.  Rsync or Windows backup for D:, specific directories
    (remove pagefile, TMP/TEMP, etc...)
4.  Avoid local data, use SVN check-out and/or SMB mount
    (using SVN really helps, especially with desk+note)

The easiest way to "recover" Windows is to make a dd of the boot/system "C:" drive.  Keeping it a well-defined geometry,
like I do (32GiB, 4096/63/255 cyl/sec/hds) means I can drop
it down where ever**.  I then use Rsync or Windows backup
for D:, targeting specific directories.  I avoid local data
like the back plague, either checking in/out via SVN, or SMB
mounts for the store.

**NOTE:  On my new notebook, with some recovery non-sense,
it's actually 2 slices (48GiB, 6144/63/255 cyl/sec/hds) at
the beginning of the disk.

> who wants reliable backups, preferably without a whole  
> extra machine to manage?

I have two (2) systems per person, plus one (1) server
(not including IPCop firewall).  I no longer maintain
a separate "backup server":  

1.  Server
2a/b.  My desktop (deprecated**), my notebook
3a/b.  Wife's desktop, wife's notebook

With exception of the notebooks, all drives are redundant.
And with exception of the notebooks, all Linux is LVM2+DM
with snapshots.

The server is really the "concentrator" for all stores
(home directories, SVN store, etc...) and backups.  I then
do a rsync of the server to my desktop.  I cannot stress
how helpful it is to keep everything in SVN, especially
when my wife is uncertain if she has the latest file of
something on her desktop or notebook.

**NOTE:  I don't even use my desktop anymore, because I've
been using my notebook for all operations for the last 2
years.  As such, it's an "extra" store for backing up
my server.  In other words, I use my desktop to be an
extra "store" for backing up the server.  

Although with my 12 x 2.5" disk sleds, I'm not sure it's
worth it.  I can use a couple of sleds for both near-line
and off-line in the system itself. 

> The desktop has two 320gb drives set up as fRAID-1
> (nVidia nForce 4) for some extra reliability, but
> there's no really clear backup structure.  Are any of
> the turn-key NAS distros stable enough to consider to
> simplify the effort?  Thanks.

Not for home use.  I've tried OpenFiler on and off and
I would do many things differently.  In reality, they are
aiming for NetApp, NFS/SMB and iSCSI support.  It's CentOS
underneath, so you can do what you want, but I'd rather
just run full CentOS (RHEL).  More flexible.

Besides, I've been doing a lot with Trac+SVN when it comes
to centralizing my data repository.  I just back that up,
along with the home directories, and I'm good.

Although I'm quickly hitting 200GiB of just photos,
especially now with my 14.6Mpix Pentax K20D shooting
JPEG+RAW (16GB SDHC cards allow me to shoot even 500
shots of that at JPEG+RAW).  So I am looking at maybe
BluRay in the near-future for that, or maybe just more
2.5" drives.

-- Bryan

P.S.  I _always_ throw the "-c" (checksum) with rsync.
It's worth the added start-up/overhead to ensure actual
files needed to be changed are actually changed.


-- 
Bryan J Smith        Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org  http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
------------------------------------------------------
I'm a PC, but Linux -- Windows: Life Without Firewalls



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