mdlbear | Backup back up (Reply)

Well, not quite, but getting there. Readers with long attention spans or short friends lists may recall my remark that it was time to find a new backup drive, and that I'd "see if 500's go on sale at Fry's this week."

Well, they did, though in the end I went for a 400GB Seagate SATA drive at $89, rather than the 500GB IDE drive for $109 that got me into the store. The SATA will go in my nice new USB/eSATA case, and should give me higher bandwidth and a lower error rate.

It seems to be a sweet little thing -- noticably quieter than the Maxtor 160 it's replacing. Because this is a backup drive that I intend to keep for a while, it's getting the slow, read/write test on formatting. Probably take all night. (20070615T0607 it flipped over from the first pattern (aa) to the second(55) at about 5:30 this morning. After that there are ff and finally 00. So we're looking at finishing up somewhere tomorrow morning.)

Meanwhile, I've been thinking seriously about how I do backups. With a little cleverness I should be able to simplify things considerably, not to mention save space and speed things up. The biggest problem with my current backup scheme is that it involves keeping a lot of history around, but my audio workflow involves making lots of fairly volatile 32-bit wave files as intermediates. Oops.

So my current thinking is to not make a monthly archive and keep it forever, but to keep only a handful of backups and rely on version control for long-term history. Perhaps make long-term copies on a quarterly basis, and do it more selectively by having per-subtree exclude lists. I'll also be pruning out some defunct users, and shifting some working directories to make a cleaner distinction between private stuff in /home, and "semi-public" stuff elsewhere.

The main motivation for that, in turn, is the fact that I now have an offsite storage location with lots of bandwidth. Separating public and private tells me what I can safely upload in plaintext, and what I'll have to encrypt. (Some of the "semi-public" stuff -- for example, work in progress and lyrics to other peoples' songs -- won't be accessible to the general public, but it's still safe for it not to be encrypted.)