I've been pondering on how I can best backup my ever growing amount of digital pictures and home videos for some time now. Here's where I am as today. My selection criteria are :
- It needs to be cheap. No, not cost effective, I mean dead cheap.
- It has to be quite. My wife HATES noisy computer gadgets.
- Did I mention, it has to be cheap ?!?!
- I want to be able to do backups over the network.
- It has to work with OpenSolaris and ZFS.
- It needs to reliable. After all our families histories is on those pictures and videos.
- I need to be able to backup OpenSolaris and Microfot Windows clients.
I already have an OpenSolaris system as a file server in my basement. At the moment, I am tempted to buy two 1TB USB drives, e.g. this type, mirror them with ZFS and connect them to my file server. I could then install Amanda on the server, and use the system as my central backup server. Anybody can see any flaws with this plan ?
rsync?
Posted by Charles Soto on October 24, 2008 at 07:55 PM PDT #
You have lots of photos and home videos you don't want to lose if something happens to the disks.
They're on a Solaris ZFS partition.
Here's what I'm doing: I have 44 GB of photos and 3 GB of video I don't want to lose.
I have a file server running Solaris ZFS (raidz) with NFS and Samba running.
I have a shared Photos folder. Plus everyone has a /home/username or \\server\username
All my original photos/videos go on that server.
As I add folders, the newest go into a folder that gets backed up. When that folder gets over 4GB, I rename it (iso1, iso2, iso3, etc) and burn that folder to more then 1 DVD to archive them. The isoX folders are not written to. Edits of those photos go into the new folder.
DVDs go off site where a fire can't burn them. One DVD to mom, one to mother-in-law, etc.
This eliminates many GB from any backup solution. It archives the critical data offsite for a disaster. It doesn't work well for data that's not static or partitioned.
FWIW - I use something called jigl to make a web gallery of my photos. It creates static HTML that any browser can point to on a web server, file system or on a DVD.
Posted by Tom on October 27, 2008 at 10:36 AM PDT #