Re: [BackupPC-users] Swapping drives for offsite

On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 2:59 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com> wrote:

There has been a vast amount of discussion on this list covering this
topic so you should probably wade through the archives.
My approach is a 3-member software RAID1 where 2 drives are always in
the server and the 3rd is a set rotated offsite. This gives you an
always-available current history plus a disaster-recovery copy and a
spare or two. My drives are 750gig (set up some time ago) and I just
recently got a laptop-size drive to work reasonably well as the
rotating member - which took some tweaking since it has 4k sectors and
the partition had to be aligned right. With this scheme you only
have to unmount momentarily while breaking the raid, but realistically
you can't do backups while the new member is syncing because the disk
is too busy. Others are doing something similar with LVM snapshots.

Yes I've waded through many megs' worth of the archives researching this, and discussed the topic with you in fact (maybe six months ago?), and my post is the result of my thought process after digesting them.

Obviously my proclivity for simplicity is overriding the advantages of the other methods. For my situation, one key consideration is for a non-geek staffer to be able to get the data back if there's a fire/explosion whatever while I'm away on holiday or otherwise unavailable - the company doesn't have much depth in ICT support. I could walk them through getting Ubuntu+BPC installed and maybe the fstab edited, but would want to add creating an array from only one member etc. into the mix. . .

If you have good network bandwidth you can also simply run another
independent instance elsewhere hitting the same targets.

This last is exactly what I'm proposing, but the "independent instances" are just getting swapped out sequentially rather than multiple machines running concurrently.

So if at all possible I'd really appreciate feedback on the pro's and cons of my specific proposed method - can you (if not necessarily from you specifically Les, "you" = " the list ") see particular gotcha's I haven't taken into account?

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Re: [BackupPC-users] Swapping drives for offsite - the whole shebang