This post is very old. Please bear in mind that information here might be incorrect or obsolete, and links can be broken. If something seems wrong, please feel free to comment or contact me and I'll update the post.
My primary disk just failed yesterday evening (around 21:30), so I lost at least all data from this week (last backup is from Sunday, 19:00.) However, I think I didn’t miss any unread e-mails, but of course I cannot check as all mails from this week are definitely lost. In case there was something urgent, please send me a mail again.
I ordered a new hard disk which should arrive early next week. I hope to be back up (no pun intended) & running around Thursday again. As soon as the RMA for the faulty disk finishes, I’ll plug it in for daily backups. While I’m at this: What’s your backup strategy?
Here I have one additional internal HDD which I use for backups once a week. I don’t have a “disaster” backup yet at a secondary location; I wonder how well Amazon S3 would be suited for something like this (or SkyDrive.) I’m also planning to install a NAS in my home network and use this for backups, but I haven’t found a nice and free backup software yet. Second problem with the NAS is how to backup the NAS, in case of failure (RAID-5 might be a solution, but how to guarantee that I can rebuild the RAID-5 in 4 years, or, worse, in case the controller fails and can’t be replaced?) I’m curious to hear what backup strategies you employ, and how you coped with disk failures so far.
Related posts:
i use dropbox for the backup case.
Hui, das darf mir nicht passieren. Wenn meine Platte abraucht, hab ich ein kleines Problem!
Eine Sicherungstrategie habe ich bisher aber keine. :-/
My backup solution is the internet for the most part. My email is stored on Google, my bookmarks / passwords are stored with Mozilla Sync. My music though, is stored on the NAS.
I tried doing backups to NAS, but found the number of options to be overwhelming. A few unpublished notes: jwz’s method won’t work on Ubuntu without a restore script to fiddle with the filesystem UUID (or reconfigure files to match the new setup), and the Simple Backup (sbackup) is dead and not very trustworthy. DejaDup looks like a winner though. My NAS is mirror raid, because I don’t need performance badly enough to deal with the complications. The good news is that RAID 5 will rebuild as long as your disk is bigger than the old one. The bad news is you won’t get anything out of that extra space.
Backup strategy: None yet, I have a RAID-1 or RAID-5 for anything that is not temporary
I heard that Amazon S3 is a nice backup solution; but I probably won’t use it for all my music and stuff.
If your RAID-5 is a Linux RAID (or maybe a ZFS RAID-Z) you can always rebuild it as long as you can get a compatible Linux/ZFS version no matter the controller.