2) a system backup with a snapshot of the entire system. With hours and
hours of configuration and setup on my boxes, Id like to have
occaisional "snapshots" of the whole system. Then if I lose a machine
(hardrive crash, theft, flood whatever) or blow the system up somehow, I
can recreate the whole thing a-new relatively easily. In this case, the
actual critical data from above would theoretically already be stored
and retrievable somewhere (and usable on any system) and therefore,
these snapshots do not have to be done as frequently. Just whenever a
major system change happens, or every couple months to include small
incremental system creep.
so for case 1 I'd love something offsite, like a dead webpage or
something where I can just automatically load these files and leave'em
for now. case 2 needs bigger storage probably and maybe something like
partitionimage with the files split onto cds/dvds and stored somewhere
safe. The infrequency of this case allows less convenient means of storage.
I didn't write about it on my web page, but to accomplish the "whole system"
backup, I have everything I have modified linked into a separate partition.
For example, /etc/exim4 is a symlink to /home/ha-dirs/etc/exim4. This allows
me to backup my entire system by only saving a dpkg --get-selections list and
the /home/ha-dirs directory tree to my backup. True, it will not be an
instant restore in case of catastrophic failure, but it saves a huge amount of
space. I can backup everything important to me on 3 CDs instead of 10.
The symlinks are automatically created, so on restore I don't have to manually
recreate all that, just do a Debian install, recreate my packages with dpkg
--set-selections, and restore /home/ha-dirs. Since I have a mirror system
with the root tree synchronized every hour, it's not a huge burden.
Also, this scheme allows me to use a network-RAID such as drbd with old
obselete hard drives, since my /home/ha-dirs is much smaller than /. I don't
use drbd anymore because I have so much redundancy, but I started using the
linking scheme above so I could use drbd with some old machines I had lying
around.