On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, perrin wrote:
> > > You could just create a disk image once a day,
> >
> > What could I do with a disk image in case of a disk failure? And "gzip -f
> > < /dev/hda > /backup_drive/image.gz" ? If I don't compress it a little
> > bit, it won't fit.
>
> I'm not sure what the problem is.
Oh, I thought that by "image" you meant like Ghost makes under Windows, or
like "cat /dev/hda > file" would make. You meant duplicate the drive.
Right, that'll work. That's basically what I'm doing now.
Something must be wrong, though -- CPU use rises to ~50% during the copy.
Both drives use DMA, according to hdparm. I didn't think CPU was supposed
to be used during a DMA transfer.
> Keep in mind that I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to indicate
> by saying "gzip -f < /dev/hda > /backup_drive/image.gz".
Run "gzip -f" where it reads from /dev/hda, and writes to
/backup_drive/image.gz . "gzip -f" gives fast, low-quality compression.
It's equivalent to "gzip -1". I would use "compress", but that's not
installed by default in many distributions.
> > I thought about that, but it would take about 115GB/700MB~=164 CD-RWs to
> > do the initial full backup. Even allowing for 2:1 compression (unlikely,
> > since I have ~4GB of MP3s), that's still 82 CD-RWs.
>
> That would definitely be a problem.
If I had a DVD burner, I might consider backing up to DVD-RW, but hard
drives are getting bigger, and DVD media is getting cheaper, and I don't
know which is doing it faster. Right now, 115GB/4.7GB~=25 DVD-RWs,
best price that I could find in a cursory search is $110 for a spindle of
25 DVD-RWs.
http://cdroutlet.com/cgi-local/shop.pl/SID=1070994003.19076/page=dvdprw.htm
That doesn't allow any extra DVDs for incremental backups, nor does it
include the cost of a DVD burner (and besides, unless the DVD burner does
CD-Rs and CD-RWs, I'm out of places to put it) and hard drive. This hard
drive cost me <$90 before shipping. I suspect a drive at a random point
in the future would cost the same or less, and be bigger. By buying the
drive now, in effect I'm trading capacity for the utility of not losing my
data. Seems fair to me.
I have a tape backup, but the tapes cost ~$30 each, and hold 10GB. A full
backup would cost me over $300 on that.
-- -eben ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm home.tampabay.rr.com/hactarAnd we never failed to fail / It was the easiest thing to do -- CSN
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