A Home Backup Strategy

Why Backup

• Hard drives always fail eventually. A recent study (http://usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder.html) of large scale IT infrastructure showed that in the field on average about 2-4% of drives are replaced every year but sometimes the figure is as much as 13%. There is always a risk of a disk failing and if you don't have backups you are just playing the odds.
• Your computer could be lost or stolen - particularly relevant if your main computer is a laptop
• You could get a virus or damage your files in some way
• You could delete or accidentally overwrite important files or want to go back to a previous version

My Backup Solution

I have a MacBook Air which only has an 80Gb hard drive (but frankly even a 300Gb drive wouldn't be large enough to store all my files which is why I use the stratey I do).

I have three folders I store files in:

Temp

Files which are large and which I don't mind losing. These therefore don't form part of the Sync process described below.

DVD

Files which are backed up to DVD but which I still want on my computer. Folders in this directory are named according to the DVDs on which the files are stored eg Photos 7, Files 2 etc. Generally my most recent music or photos are stored in the DVD folder because I still want access to them but don't need them syncronised any more.

Sync

This is the equivalent of a Mac OS X Documents folder or Windows My Documents folder and contains all the files I am currently working on which still require backing up. This directory is regularly syncronised with a MyBook networked storage device on my LAN.

Within Sync are the following directories:

To Burn

This folder contains files which I no longer need to work on all the time but which, when grouped together, are large enough to fill a DVD and can therefore be burned. Ideally this directory should always be empty because I should always burn DVDs as soon as I can.

To Sort

This is where I dump new Music, pictures from my digital or any other files which I need to sort through into the proper directory structure. Once the files are sorted they can be move to To Burn where they wait until there are enough of them to be worth burning a DVD for. As an example if I have 1.6Gb of photos I don't look at any more, they can go into To Burn until I have enough to fill a Photos 8 DVD, then I'll burn them.

Photos

Contains the photos I need to sort

Music

Contains the music I need to sort

Junk

Although I try to organise files properly, a lot of the time I just end up with lots of junk files I might access again but which aren't worth trying to organise properly. The Junk folder contains lots of sub-folders numbered from 1 onwards. Junk files go in one of these sub-folders and when the latest one gets quite large or when there is some sort of conceptual change in the contents of a numbered sub-folder I just create the next folder and start putting junk files in there instead.

Files

These contain personal files which need backing up

Work

These contain work files which need backing up

The backup DVDs are copied to the MyBook when they are made. The Sync directory is syncronised with the MyBook every week. Any files which need to be version controlled are stored in a mercurial repository. Any particularly sensitive data is also copied onto my 1Gb memory stick. This means that at the very least there are two copies of all my data.

Routine Maintenance

/opt/local/bin/rsync -aHxv -n --delete --progress --numeric-ids -e "ssh -c arcfour -o Compression=no -x" "/Users/james/Documents/To Burn/" "root@192.168.1.10:/shares/internal/PUBLIC/Linux/MyBook/To\ Burn/"

/opt/local/bin/rsync -aHxv -z --delete --progress --numeric-ids -e "ssh -c arcfour -o Compression=no -x" "/Users/james/Documents/To Burn/" "root@192.168.1.10:/shares/internal/PUBLIC/Linux/MyBook/To\ Burn/"

/opt/local/bin/rsync -aHxv -z --delete --progress --numeric-ids -e "ssh -c arcfour -o Compression=no -x" "/Users/james/Documents/" "root@192.168.1.10:/shares/internal/PUBLIC/Linux/MyBook/"