How does everybody backup?
Since OS X Apple always came with decent freeware solutions that could be used with external firewire drives for example. Time Capsule is a logical (and great) successor.
But what about linux and windows? At work I use linux and we backup with ibms tivoli software. This is crap of course, because replay of a crashed or exchanged hd requires installation of a linux system first in order to access the backup. After that the data has to be moved bit by bit and apps have to be re-installed one by one.
As long as I used windows (until 2000), it was even worse. (sidenote: the degree with which an os is called professional is reverse to its backup capabilities. This strikes me since ever!).
How does everybody backup their macs, linux boxes or windows systems?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadhttp://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/u2/universe/
EVERYTHING is stored as data on the u2 database. All javascript, css, html, php, and mysql is generated from this data through custom builds. No need to backup anything except the source data and the custom programs used to generate everything else. And all of that is within the IBM/u2/bin directory.
Have a disaster? Restore the environment, restore the u2 database & code, and rebuild everything else. I designed it for the development leverage. The ease of disaster recovery is just a bonus.
For business stuff it's tar + ssh to a geographically distant location.
Yes, I like eating dogfood. :-)
Should suffice...
We also use gpg (gnupg.org) to encrypt our critical databases and code repository and send them to Amazon S3 every night. I started doing this after the last earthquake here in the bay area (which was centered near Freemont, where our colo is). I have tattooed the key to unencrypt them on my inner thigh.
Does anybody have any experience with that?
Another big plus is that you can run an unlimited number of instances across any number of machines after paying a one time fee of $25.
It looks like the "Plus" service's block-level access and transfer resume would pay for itself pretty quickly with a reasonable volume of data ($1/month vs 0.10 or 0.18 per GB up/down), besides being worth it for $1 anyway.
Jungledisk Plus gives you the option to view files online - so it's a backup + online viewing option (since it uses Amazon S3 and is already online).
PC Backup: I dumped my PCs 18 months ago when I bought my Intel-chip Mac. Now both my "PCs" (XP development machine and Win2k3 Web Server) are running as virtual machines on my Mac, so my Windows install is actually just one big file used by Parallels which is backed up as part of the Mac backup.
--Jack
I only backup code and documents though. For other things it might not be such a great solution.
Most days nothing's really changed in the folders I've selected for backup; when things do change it's usually just a new directory of pictures, maybe an mp3, and some new source code; the whole backup takes maybe a minute to run in that case.
All email mirrored from off site to local IMAP server once a day.
SuperDuper on macs to firewire drive once a week.
rsync and cron on FreeBSD to remote FreeBSD boxes once a day
No PC's so no problem there (for ever) ;)
For Linux I just use rsync. Restoring a failed Linux system often requires fiddling with Knoppix as well; get a nice recent Knoppix disc burned and ready to go in an emergency.
Don't forget: have more than one backup, and have an offsite backup.
I never really tested my Windows system backup solutions; I decided to abandon Windows instead. For backing up Windows files I used to use SyncBack: http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html -- it was pretty good.
I need to work on doing better online backups. A lot of my work is web stuff, though, and that lives on other servers anyway.
On Mac OS X I use Silverkeeper (I don't have leopard).
On Windows I use SyncBack [1].
All my development work is on a remote SVN server which is backed to the NAS.
The NAS is backed up to DVDs which are shipped to my parents house.
Any recommendations for online remote storage?
[1] Syncback tutorial http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/geek-to-live-aut...
we'll be kicking out news.yc beta invites soon :)
Does this make me a bad person?
but for personal computer files I manually put important files in an S3 bucket or two. not the most efficient but it works. I'm considering writing some rsync to S3 type of thing. regardless i love having my stuff online (and safe). my MBP doesn't have much other than essential apps and a few files i'm working on at the moment. most other things are online.
the only exception being media which i sync to an external drive manually every few months.
For those creating archives, you may be interested in xar: http://code.google.com/p/xar/ It preserves all the metadata such as SELinux information, ACLs, EAs, etc. On Mac OS X, it preserves all that, the resource fork and finder metadata as well. Two options are particularly relevant to backups: --link-same makes identical file data into hardlinks, reducing space consumption both within the archive, and on disk when extracted. --coalesce-heap when files with identical data are encountered, the data is only stored once in the archive, reducing the size of the archive.