[dba-Tech] Backup redux

[Jim Lawrence]

Hi Gary:

Good Tech. :-)

Jim

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Kjos" <garykjos at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" <dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2015 12:29:59 PM
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Backup redux

You just can not have too many backups. And it's a good idea to have
multiple forms of media involved. When I was in a mainstream IT
Mainframe operations environment we kept daily, weekly and monthly
backups and kept 30 daily, a dozen weekly and 2 years worth of monthly
backups of our data and maybe disk images too.   Some of those got
rotated offsite every week. 9 track reel to reel tapes were relatively
cheap though. We spent at least 12 hours a week doing backups.

I just bought an external 5 TB Seagate drive at Costco yesterday. Cost
$135 as I recall. Plan to back up all my systems including music and
photos to that.

I also have a Thermaltake hard drive docking station that allows me to
swap regular sata hard drives so I can rotate several to do
generational backups.  It connects via an ESATA connection and so runs
at about regular hard drive speed.

It all works well.  When I remember to use it.  That is the downfall.

GK

On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Arthur Fuller <fuller.artful at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yesterday I suffered a minor disaster. For years I've used an external USB
> drive as the location of my backups. Yesterday that drive died.
> Unfortunately, I also used that same drive to house my music collection.
> Bad idea. Note to Self: an external drive devoted to BackUp should have no
> other purpose. So now I'm going to buy another 2TB external drive, and
> mirror everything of consequence.
>
> Another lesson learned is that while developing various apps,. I would
> create a directory off the root called c:\xxx, where xxx is something
> meaningful. Another bad idea; should have placed these projects in the
> default directory tree (My Documents), so they'd automatically be included
> in the backups and I wouldn't have to remember that they were isolated from
> the default backup strategy. Fortunately, I was able to recover, since I
> also burned these projects of interest to a thumb drive. Actually, that's
> not quite accurate; I did lose a few iterations of the data, but ultimately
> that's ok since I'm developing the FE and BE as separate projects, and it
> really doesn't matter that my BE data is old, since the data model has not
> changed.
>
> Long story short: I have moved all the significant data/directories from
> their isolated locations, into the "Documents" folder. 'Twas a PITA but now
> my arse is covered, I think.
>
> Meanwhile I have to wait until the 28th to buy a backup^2 external drive,
> but with luck, the system shall persist as is for at least that long.
>
>
> Moral of the story: make sure that your backup drive has a backup; in the
> ideal case, that would be on an adjacent box, or perhaps the cloud. Given
> the size of my datasets (some over 50GB, and I have several of those), the
> cloud seems impractical; so my only choice would seem to be a few external
> 1+ TB drives and to mirror everything. If you've a better strategy, I'd
> love to learn it.
>
> --
> Arthur
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-- 
Gary Kjos
garykjos at gmail.com
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