Okay, I’m a little paranoid about losing data (or as my wife puts it, pain-in-the-ass OCD). So as the data on this server has grown to 20+gigabytes, its been a challenge figuring out how to back it up in case of a failure at the data center, and also how to capture regular snapshots.
The current scheme is this. First I signed up with BQBackup.Com which is a New York-based company that specializes in hosting for online backups. $20/month buys 100gb of storage.
Second, I set up an rsync job in crontab so that every morning at 4 a.m. rsync starts on the server and syncs with my BQBackup site.
Finally, I installed Linux on my MSI Wind and created a couple of cron jobs that at 6 a.m. download the MySql databases from the main server, then rsync with the BQBackup site, and finally write the resulting 20gb to a year-month-day.tar.gz file. Throw those on a hard drive and store at an undisclosed location offsite.
And just in case that all fails, the files on the MSI Wind get backed up to Jungle Disk along with the other 300gb or so of personal data I really can’t afford to lose.
I also do that with my bqbackup.com account, however my backups are done weekly (every year a full backup, weekly only a differential backup), using DAR, then encrypting with GPG (using conventional encryption) and generating PAR2 recovery data files (used to recover in case of data corruption); then all is uploaded to the bqbackup server via RSYNC. With this setup I lost the efficiency of RSYNC (which would only upload the data differences), but this is needed to keep the remote data encrypted.
By the way, on some servers I also upload the data to Amazon S3 (with AWS program [timkay.com/aws/]), for redundancy.
I never do physical offsite backups, because really, I don’t have any other safe place to store a backup external disk. Most of my relatives or friends are not that careful and safe deposits are too expensive around here.
And finally, I rsync everynight my current-work-projects directory to an USB thumb drive I always carry with me. The rationale is that if something destroys my computer/my home/my local backup, I still can keep working while I get a new computer and restore my remote backup (some clients don’t wait, even if you tell them your house exploded).
So, I don’t think you are paranoid… I think you are very careful.
Regards,
MV