Ray Leventhal wrote: > Hi, > > I'm looking for common practices for backing up user data to disk. My > user data is all in /home. I'm also interested in what folks are doing > for things backing up os and configs. > > Any pointers on setting up rsync, cpio, etc would be appreciated. > Pointers to good how-to's especially welcome. > > Currently we're using Arkeia Network Backup (commercial product with > which I am in no way affiliated), and it's great, but with disk space so > cheap, I'd love to be able to take my current non-raid setup and find a > way to get up and running quickly in the case of some failures. > In a mixed Linux/Windows environment, I deployed a Linux backup server and mounted users data directories on the backup server using smb/cifs and then did a "local" rsync of the mounted dirs to the backup dir (easy to run as a cron job each night). Further backups may then be written to removable storage for off site storage or additional disks in case of drive failure. I like rsync for backing up changing data sets such as users data. To negate the risks/downtime associated with hard drive failure, I cloned the original OS setup using dd to spare HDs and locked them in the safe. Primary drive failure would require replacement of the drives (and a system update) and restoring data from the latest backups, although there's no reason one couldn't run 2 near identical backup servers side by side if the hardware is available. There are simply so many different ways one could implement a backup strategy depending on hardware available, what software you're comfortable with, whether you want to script your own or use a backup package, the type of data you need to back up etc. The *important* thing is that you're comfortable with your backup procedure, it meets your needs, it's performed regularly, it's tested and it works.