useful stuff

[paulunderwood]

Having read recently how "fatphil" lost some data recently to disk crash, I thought I share how I have my backup set up at the moment. I do an automatic backup at 4am everyday (from one computer which has everything I value mounted, to another.)

You'll need "cron","rsync" and "ssh" installed on the machine to be backed up and "ssh" on the the machine to which you backup.

Full instructions can be found at:
http://linuxgazette.net/104/odonovan.html

[gribozavr]

Personally I like backuppc. It can backup linux and windows workstations as it supports samba, ssh and rsync transports. You can set up a working scalable configuration in as litttle as in 30 minutes, but nevertheless backuppc is quite flexible. Of course, it supports incremental backups, backups on demand, it has web interface with a feature to browse any backup and download a .zip archive of selected files etc.

But I have a question to hard drive specialists: how long do you think a 40 GB Wesetrn Digital drive manufactured 3 years ago (and turned on 24/7 last 1 year) will live? I'm worrying about it, though I have no reasons.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by gribozavr

Personally I like backuppc. It can backup linux and windows workstations as it supports samba, ssh and rsync transports. You can set up a working scalable configuration in as litttle as in 30 minutes, but nevertheless backuppc is quite flexible. Of course, it supports incremental backups, backups on demand, it has web interface with a feature to browse any backup and download a .zip archive of selected files etc.

But I have a question to hard drive specialists: how long do you think a 40 GB Wesetrn Digital drive manufactured 3 years ago (and turned on 24/7 last 1 year) will live? I'm worrying about it, though I have no reasons.

The fact that it has survived this long suggests that it will probably live for a few more years yet. Most disks either die in the first few weeks or go on to give somewhere between five and fifteen years service, in my experience. I'm running quite a few disks here that are at least six years old and one which came with my Pentium Pro system. That alone tells you it's about ten years old by now.

Paul

[JHagerson]

Originally Posted by gribozavr

But I have a question to hard drive specialists: how long do you think a 40 GB Wesetrn Digital drive manufactured 3 years ago (and turned on 24/7 last 1 year) will live? I'm worrying about it, though I have no reasons.

One of the things that is very hard on equipment is cold start. If you have a drive that you are just allowing to run, I would expect that you would get more service than in a similar situation where you turn the machine on and off repeatedly.