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On Tue, 19 Apr 2011, Roland Tarver wrote:
On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Gordon Henderson <gordon+dcglug@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: <snip>So what might be the best way? I reckon that with the co-operation of a friend (or 2) then you could get a good system in-place. Everyone has 2 removable drives of sufficient capacity, and one is at home and one with a trusted friend (but you'll want to use whole-disk encryption, anyway).I assume this removable drive would installed in your friends linux pc?
No. You're just giving it to them for safe keeping - acting as a cheap off-site storage location.
So on a daily basis, rsync your live data to the backup, using various tricks to maintain several days worth of storage (cp -al), then once a week, you swap your "live" disk with that held by the friend and carry on.If the drives are rsynced daily - why do you swap them over? Just to even the wear and tear? Presumably the drive at home will be doing more work than the one at your friends.
The remote one is turned off. You could swap them daily but that might be a PITA - what I'm suggesting here is a scheme that gives you a weeks worth of daily snapshots online & local to you - handy for accidental file deletion, and data older then a week is kept off-site - handy for when your house gets demolished. So at most you'll lose a weeks worth of data.
There is almost a need for a product like this. Maybe. You buy it once, plumb it in at a friends and then there are no on-going backup costs, except power - which if it is just a drive plugged into your mates pc, will hopefully not be too much. Arrangements could be made so that it is not on all the time too (esp. if it was an external drive). hmmm...
No - Not online.There are commercial services that do this - I used one when managing a company in Bristol - although it was tapes, the principle was the same. The company had an on-site fire-safe (or 2), and once a week, a man in an un-marked white van would drive by and we'd swap a big pelican box with tapes in it. Often giving him more tapes than we'd get back as we were also keeping an archive facility (as opposed to backup) These were being kept in a secure bunker in Wiltshire...
From what I've experienced recently with friends & family, people do nottake good enough care of personal belongings... It's just too easy to lose years worth of digital photos now, yet trivially easy backup and store them. Even a home media safe is relatively affordable these days - a quick look at a site I had open finds:
http://www.screwfix.com/p/phoenix-fire-media-safe-7ltr/85859although that's not that big inside it does have a 2-hour fire protection time and it's enough for a few disk drives, passports, etc. You can get bigger for the same price, but only one-hour fire protection - e.g.
http://www.screwfix.com/p/phoenix-fire-document-safe-20ltr/91789 Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq