I also use a second drive for weekly backups. If I lose a few days of
new date to a drive failure, it's not a big deal. I am more likely to
corrupt something myself and I would rather use the second drive as a
backup to restore that file from instead of having a mirrored copy of
the corrupt files.
Again, let me stress this is NOT a revenue generating box. If it were,
I would have both raid and a backup.
Here is how I have it automated....
In the /etc/cron.weekly I have a simple script "rsync_bak"
[root@main /root]# ll /etc/cron.weekly
total 12
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 277 Apr 3 2001 0anacron
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 414 Apr 29 2003 makewhatis.cron
-rwx------ 1 root root 96 Apr 3 2003 rsync_bak
The script simply mounts the second drive /dev/hdb1 to the dir /mnt/iso
(I know - poor choice of names). Then it deletes the previous week's
backed up files. Next it uses rsync to duplicate everything from /
recursively on the normal drive to the backup drive. When complete, it
unmounts that second drive to keep me from messing up the files.
[root@main /root]# cat /etc/cron.weekly/rsync_bak
#!/bin/bash
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/iso
rm -Rf /mnt/iso/*
rsync -avrz / /mnt/iso
umount /dev/hdb1
[root@main /root]#
Yes, the drive is still running and on the same box so it is still
somewhat vulnerable (lightning, fire, etc), but again, my priority was
to have backups that are safe from me.
perrin wrote:
>>A bit of downtime while I disconnect the old hda and move hdc to hda isn't
>>a problem; I was more concerned about the noise, heat, and wear on the
>>drive of a RAID setup. My hope is that by using the backup drive as
>>little as possible, it would be as close to new when the main drive dies.
>>If I could do mirroring, where I could only update the second copy a few
>>times a day and spin it down between those times, that would be OK. I
>>think all mirroring is live, though.
>
>
> That's sort of the point of mirroring, so, yes, it would be "live". One of
> the benefits of (true) mirroring is that placing the drives on separate
> channels provides shorter data-read times. If you're working on a
> shoestring budget, however, it's not generally the way to go for backing up
> your system. Any type of RAID backup isn't a good idea on a shoestring,
> unless the last-minute accuracy of a backup is critical, because it's just
> not very cost-effective in comparison to other backup schemes (such as your
> daily-backup system).
>
> You could just create a disk image once a day, which would be quicker than
> running a copy routine. Even cheaper than using a hard drive for daily
> backups would be to use a CDRW (or series of CDRWs) to make backups, but
> that requires a lot more administrative overhead, and I'm sure it's
> something you've already considered and discarded by this point.
>
> By the way, I don't think I've introduced myself to the list yet. Hi. I'm
> Chad. I'm actually quite the n00b with Linux, but I like what I see so far.
> Expect stupid questions from me at some point -- when I get sick of trying
> to figure out seamless integration with a Windows workgroup and fax server
> setup on my own, probably.
>
>
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