Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive storage questions

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 6:31 AM, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
> On Mon, 04 May 2015 03:23:48 -0500, Dale wrote:
>
>> >> What
>> >> I wish, I had a second puter in a outbuilding that I could copy to
>> >> over ethernet or something.  May help in the event of a house fire
>> >> etc.
>> >
>> > You have, it's called Amazon S3 :) It's a lot cheaper than a second
>> > computer, and a lot more reliable.
>
>> My internet is way to slow for that.  It would take weeks maybe a month
>> to upload all this stuff.  I have DSL but it is the basic package.  If I
>> were on cable or had a real fast DSL, maybe.  Thing is, I really don't
>> want some of my stuff on the internet anyway.  ;-)
>
> You only need to upload it once, so it doesn't really matter how long it
> takes. After that you do incremental backups. I use app-backup/duplicity
> which not only takes care of incremental backups and communicating with
> S3, but also encrypts everything with GPG. No one would know you were
> uploading goat porn :)

I tend to use a few strategies.

Typical stuff in /home, /etc: duplicity daily backups to S3.  It is
small, and safe.  Oh, and it is all on RAID too, which reduces the
risk of needing to actually restore it (RAID is primarily about
downtime, not backup).  Encryption keys are burned to multiple CDs and
stored in multiple safe places.

Photos and other valuable media:  Also gets the duplicity S3
treatment, but after every few GB I do a one-time upload to Glacier
and then remove it from my daily backups.  This stuff is write-once,
so backing it up daily is overkill.  When S3 was more expensive I
would burn two copies to DVD and store offsite, but that became a PITA
and Amazon is a lot cheaper now.  If I ever need to restore it it is
unlikely I'd need it all at once, so I can do so slowly and not get
killed by fees.

MythTV recordings, random video from internet, etc:  btrfs raid plus a
second daily rsync to ext4 (still local).  The rsync is only because
I'm still in playing-around mode with btrfs.  Once I trust it fully
I'll drop it and just rely on the RAID.  I'd be annoyed if I lost all
this stuff, but only for a week or two.  Trying to properly back up
multiple TB of media is just way too expensive and this stuff just
isn't valuable enough to care about.

I structure my filesystem around my backup strategy.  All the stuff I
really care about is in /home.  Stuff I don't care so much about goes
outside of /home and is symlinked back in where necessary.  So, I
don't need to play around with too many exclusion rules.

-- 
Rich