backups

two backup-related articles today on slashdot. whenever there's a backup-related article on slashdot, i get paranoid and send myself lots of reminder emails to get into the habit of backing stuff up. then i usually ignore the reminders until the next time there's any such article.

surprisingly, at this most busy point in my life, i actually have a decently solid backup setup, though it's hardly fire-resistant. i have four things that i'd care to back up:

1) the blog. i'm rather fond of it.
2) photos. meh. i lost a bunch on a stolen laptop and i don't even remember what they were. i could live without these, but why not back them up?
3) digital music. i've, uh, ripped all my cds and it'd be a PITA to, uh, re-rip them all.
4) misc. configuration data (/etc!) and stuff like old school papers and tax info.

i used to occasionally dump the above onto CDs when I remembered to do it, and then I got a DVD burner and thus backups became even more infrequent (had to fill up a DVD!). when I started caring about the blog, I'd duplicate it onto another partition of the server's HDD. hardly disaster proof.

now, I've got, as mentioned, a setup that i am somewhat happy with, though it still has kinks. I have two mighty unix machines in my server room. mighty unix machine #1 hosts this very blog, mighty unix machine #2 hosts my local mp3 store. one or the other or both hosts my photos. attached to mighty unix machine #2 is a nice 250G usb drive. each night, mighty unix machine #1 dumps the blog and other assorted goodies to a backup partition. later that night (as of today's script mods), mighty unix machine #2 rsyncs that backup partition to its local drive, then rsyncs the backup partition, plus the mp3 store, plus the photo store to the external drive. thus, the blog is mirrored nightly on three different hard drives, and the music is duplicated once. i'm safe from individual hard drive crashes, but less safe from monsoons or hails of brimstone.

and every once in a while, just for fun, I dump the backups from mighty unix machine #1 onto a DVD. i suppose I could do the same for the photos. by now, the music takes up too much space for dvd backup.

and at last, i don't freak out and send myself TODO emails when i read on slashdot that someone deleted 83 billion dollars (or 200k, depending) worth of data.