For many years I have scoffed at the idea of backing up my hard drives. Why should I need to do that? Hard drives don’t lose data anymore, they are fine-tuned machines!
While this is true, there are a lot of reasons to implement a good backup policy. The most obvious of course is hard-drive failure; I’ve seen my brother go through two hard-drives worth of important files because he didn’t have good backups (note that he’s pretty rough on his computers). Next on the list we have power-outages and spikes. Although the ext3 filesystem (and many others) employ journaling (a system to prevent data loss in the event of power failure or disconnection of the interface), there is still room for data to be lost or corrupted. This is the reason I have my computer set to stay powered-off in the event of power-failure and return, since one power failure often indicates there will be more on the way.
Probably the most widely-used method of backing up important documents is on external media. This can come in the form of external hard-drives, tape archives, or CDs and DVDs. However, there are two main problems with all of these solutions:
- Physical media can degrade over time, causing data loss and corruption
- Should your home suffer a catastrophic event, such as a fire, tornado, flood, etc., these backups will be lost along with your computer
A couple months ago I started backup up my files to an online host. Using rsync, this usually takes no more than 10-15 seconds a night. Only documents that have changed since the previous backup are transferred, and they are compressed prior to transfer and then decompressed on the other end. This method also comes with an added benefit: your files are accessible from anywhere that you have an internet connection! Obviously this isn’t an ideal situation for large media files (and ideed, I don’t backup my MP3, movie, or television collections), but it works wonders for your Skulework and other personal documents.
Unfortunately for me, it seems that my webhost has decided that the 500GiB of storage and 5TiB of monthly bandwidth provided with the cheapest hosting plan are not to be used for storing personal documents and backups. I can’t say I think this is a fair decision; I am currently using about 3GiB of my account and running up a monthly bandwidth usage of about 200MiB, not to mention the fact that I am clearly using my hosting service to host this very website.
Oh well. DH never advertised their service as a web-hosting-only solution, and in fact I was drawn to them by the large number of technical services available. As such, I will be continuing to use my storage and my bandwidth as I see fit. <emo>If DH decides to make an issue about it, I will quite politely let them know that I will be taking my business elsewhere, as what they have to offer is no longer a service to my liking. Since I have prepaid for a year’s worth of service, should this happen, I can only hope they will be considerate enough to refund the money for the remainder of the term once I have cancelled my account.</emo>
p.s. For those of you that are interested, here is the command I use to rsync my /home/ directory:
rsync -e ssh --stats --exclude-from=/home/rsync-exclude -avuz /home/ {username}@thebadness.org:{remote_folder}/
A quick deciphering: this calls rsync using the SSH protocol to transfer the files to a remote location. The –stats gives me important summary information such as time-to-run, average transfer speed etc. The –exclude-from is a list of folders that I don’t want backed up (such as desktop backgrounds, any torrents I have running etc.). The option -a is for “Archive” (commonly used options such as recursive, don’t follow symlinks etc.); the option -v is for verbose output; the option -u tells rsync not to update files that are already newer on the remote host; and finally the option -z tells rsync to use file-crompression, reducing bandwidth usage and time-to-transfer.
