[PLUG] Backups are very important (trust me)

[Christopher N. Deckard]

Last week I had a conversation with some of my cronies about backups. 
Basically, how to do backups in a reliable, yet convenient manner.  I 
don't have a tape drive.  There is a CD burner in the household, but I 
don't trust CDRs.  I acquired some extra jaz disks (1GB in size) and 
tried to figure out how best to use them.  The cronies and I through 
around the idea of using Amanda, maybe just tar, or just replicating to 
a cheap slow disk.

So that is where the story begins...

This weekend I decided to put some of those newly aquired jaz disks to 
use.  I reorganized a bunch of file on my drives, put things on the file 
server (no, home dirs are not on the fileserver yet) and did, what I 
thought was, a pretty good job of organizing things.  I trimmed my 
homedir down from close to 2GB to .5GB.  Small enough to fit on a jaz 
disk, with room to spare.  I put my homedir on one, and everything else 
on another.

Now, the fun really began tonight.

I always wondered if I would ever have a drive crash on me.  Well, that 
time came tonight.  One of my 9GB Micropolis drives apparently decided 
to kill itself.  I thought that maybe it was a funky filesystem error. 
Dropped to single user, unmounted the drive, and then ran xfs_repair on 
it hoping to get somewhere sane.  No go.  All I got were a bunch of SCSI 
errors saying that it was trying to position the heads somewhere, but 
that it was failing.  Not a good sign.

REBOOT!!! to single user

I mounted the other 9GB Micropolis where the old one was.  Grabbed my 
trusty jaz disks and untarred homedirs back to the clean drive.

Now, don't think that trusting a jaz disk is something to do.  I myself 
have never had problems with one.  And this drive has been through about 
12 moves over the last 4 years.  It still works.  Many older drives don't.

My point of this email is that having a backup of important data is not 
something to joke about.  Whether you want to run a firewall or not for 
a dialup connection is nothing compared to having a good backup.  BACK 
YOUR STUFF UP.  At least make an attempt to.  Buy a huge slow hard 
drive.  Get a CD burner.  Zip/Jaz/MO media.  Whatever.  Don't think that 
it can't happen to you, it can and will.  It's just a matter of whether 
or not you want to be caught off guard.  I am very lucky that I backed 
things up on Sunday.  Stuff might be a few days old, but there was no 
way I could have recreated 5 years of data.

-Chris