on Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 10:38:39PM -0700, Carla Schroder (carla@bratgrrl.com) wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 September 2003 8:57 pm, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> > on Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 03:33:32PM +0200, Jasper Metselaar
> (jasper@formmailer.nl) wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I have a Debian testing system and would like to make a backup
> > > (image) of it, so I can easily restore the system when I've messed
> > > things up.I searched through the list archives, but the messages I
> > > found are rather old.What's currently the best way to make an
> > > image of a debian system?
>
> My fave backup method is using Star and rsync, and backing up to
> another hard drive. It's fast and easy, and hard drives are so cheap
> you can have all the redundancy you want for not a lot of money.
Online backups are convenient. They're not a persistant, redundant,
assured archive.
What's your risk model? The fire / earthquake / hurricane / burglary /
disgruntled employee / vengeful ex having access to your primary system
and backup system sharing a site location will take out your primaries
and backups in one fell swoop. I've seen all of these scenarios.
I've been meaning to add an image of the WTC towers to my backups page.
Numerous systems failures (both IT and organisational) resulted from
situations in which backup, redundant, or failover resources were
located in adjacent offices, different floors, the other tower,
surrounding buildings, or even elsewhere in Manhattan (traffic,
communications, and power were a mess after the attacks).
A rule of thumb in business is to locate resources 75-150 miles from
your primary site. This is beyond the range of most wide-ranging
disasters -- hurricanes, earthquakes, ice storms, power outages. Though
not all, if you remember the events of August 14. A major
pharmaceutical firm I worked for had fully redundant data centers at two
locations in the US, and Australia, any of which could pick up the load
if needs be, within 30 minutes (the firm had worldwide research
operations on four continents).
Nearline backups are well and good. They're not an assured archival
system. Don't kid yourself into thinking they are.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Defeat EU Software Patents! http://swpat.ffii.org/
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