Comments on: Current Backup Solution

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:09:23 +0000

At the risk of sounding like an advert (I’m not linkspam, honest!) I’ll be investing in an HP HomeServer soon – it’s got an agent that runs on Windows to back up any connected machines either overnight on on-demand. It’s not Time Machine, but it’s a damn good solution for the M$ fans, imho.
If only it would back up my Ubuntu machine as well…

By: Maarten

Maarten — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:34:29 +0000

@Thomas Hall regarding rsync:

I love rsync as a backup tool (and even more so, rsnapshot, a script that will do incremental backups using rsync without wasting a lot of disk space).

HOWEVER, on the Mac there are plenty of issues with using rsync to do backups as Mac file systems have all kinds of gotchas that unix/linux file systems do not.

See e.g. this page:
http://inik.net/node/151

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:29:58 +0000

That’s a lesson I’ve already learned the hard way.

By: Robert Accettura

Robert Accettura — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:24:47 +0000

I recently went one further. Purchased secondary DNS from another provider. This way if my primary hosting (which has DNS in a 2nd facility) were to have a massive problem, mail still can work.

Many people forget DNS is a failure point if both DNS are in the same DC.

I’ve now got DNS in several data centers, and multiple providers. There’s no single point of failure other than hacking the authoritative server.

Next up in my battle to become more redundant is failback mail to a 2nd provider.

By: spiral

spiral — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:39:09 +0000

Wow, your mysql backup strategy is very close to mine. For a mediawiki kbase at work I do four daily dumps, gzip them and ship them offsite. The space they occupy is trivial – the data they contain is priceless. Its nice to see someone else doing the same to justify my low tech approach.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:25:45 +0000

Once you set up Time Machine, it will run hourly. This is a nice way to recover anything that has changed since your last clone should something go wrong.

By: BillSaysThis

BillSaysThis — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:15:17 +0000

Alex, would you explain why you used Time Machine first, before uperDuper? It doesn’t seem like you use it eer again in this process.

Thanks!

By: tecosystems » links for 2008-02-21

tecosystems » links for 2008-02-21 — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 05:18:20 +0000

[...] Current Backup Solution | alexking.org everyone needs one of these (tags: backup alexking howto) [...]

By: Thomas R. Hall

Thomas R. Hall — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:21:58 +0000

Have you read jwz’s article on backups on the Mac? It’s a decent overview on how to use rsync to back up everything. Could be used in place of SuperDuper.

By: A Few Quickies | Keener Living

A Few Quickies | Keener Living — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:57:28 +0000

[...] Alex King describes how he accomplishes backups. [...]

By: Valerie Booth

Valerie Booth — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:18:41 +0000

So there I was last week, staring in disbelief, at the blue screen of death. I had not seen that in years.

And behind that bsod was every website, every invoice, every Photoshop file, every Illustrator file, every scrap of my digital being. Disbelief gave way to denial, as in, “Oh no, you did not just crash on me…”

I looked at my ezBackUp drive sitting on the bookshelf behind me (disconnected and unused, of course) and began making colorful pleas and heartfelt promises to the digital gods. Can you believe I actually got the darn thing down from the bookshelf and dusted it off as if THAT was going to fix my hard drive. Dogged determination would make that bsod just go away at the next attempt to boot.

Thanks for the post, Alex! I’m livin’ it.

By: stephen o'grady

stephen o'grady — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 06:18:21 +0000

for the folks looking for a MySQL backup solution, you might look at Zmanda’s free and open source ZRM package. we use it, and i detailed the setup instructions here.

at its core, it’s using the same mysqldump facility you can get at via cron, but it handles versioning and encryption as well.

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 05:55:20 +0000

I believe I’m using this on the web server. I use JungleDisk on the desktop.

The great thing about HD clones vs. SVN or syncing solutions is you are back up and running very quickly; assuming you have a replacement for whatever broke.

By: will langford

will langford — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 05:35:52 +0000

Great article. I just lost a hard drive right before a deadline, I am now implementing using SVN, as well as version control will be nice.

What S3 scripts are you using, would you mind sharing?

By: David Cohen

David Cohen — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:25:54 +0000

Alex, thanks for posting what you do for backup. I’ve been struggling with this since switching to the mac more than a year ago. whatever i do has seemed unreliable. i thought time machine would fix some of that, but i’ve read about restore issues and also it fails for me on a regular basis and just craps out. so i ditched it. right now i’m using mimeo and want to experiment with their sync features to keep important stuff sync’d on various machines in various locations. the backup seems to work fairly well. i really like your idea about duplicating your email. i use fastmail and think sending it to a second imap server makes a ton of sense for an extra few bucks a year. thanks again.