On Sat, 2011-08-13 at 09:13 -0500, Joe Greco wrote:
We used to use DVD's for off-site backup, but that's not been the best of solutions. I've been experimenting with external hard drives but I am less comfortable with them; I've seen too many drives fail. The idea of letting them sit for awhile and praying they spin up later bothers me. :-)
I can understand that. That's why I use a rotation and retention system as well as two NASes syncing to one-another with the backups being performed from the second NAS. I treat them like I used to treat tape. The onsites contain nightly incrementals as well as weekly full dumps. These drives are rotated every week. Every month a copy of the latest full dump is copied to another set of drives which are sent to offsite storage. I keep two copies offsite. To implement this, I need a minimum of nine USB drives. I actually have 10 so I can have an extra one onsite as a hardware replacement-spare. Online Nearline Onsite Offsite Storage Backup Backup Backup ---------------------------------------------- [USB7]<--{[USB5],[USB6]} | ^ V | [USB8] | | | V | [NAS1]>>>>>[NAS2]>>>>>[USB0]>>>{[USB3],[USB4]} | V [USB1] | V [USB2] Nothing's perfect. There's still risk but there's some amount of assurance. -- /*=================[ Jake Khuon <khuon@NEEBU.Net> ]=================+ | Packet Plumber, Network Engineers /| / [~ [~ |) | | -------- | | for Effective Bandwidth Utilisation / |/ [_ [_ |) |_| NETWORKS | +==================================================================*/