19 Dec
2011
19 Dec
'11
8:51 a.m.
On Dec 19, 2011, at 11:37 AM, Holm Tiffe wrote:
That's only one half of the story: Everyone knows
that backups of
data are urgently nececcary...... after the first HD crash.
Your knifes aren't a problem if you ahve backups.
I actually only *really* caught the backup bug about two years ago, after an errant
third-party script meant to apply patches to GCC for AVR compilation ended up doing an
"rm -rf ~/*" or something similar. I only realized when it started spitting out
permissions errors for some root-owned files in there.
I actually had backups, but they were through Mozy, which was terrible; pulling 80 gigs of
data through a 1 MB/sec or less connection was painful, especially since it was my laptop
which meant I had to do it piecemeal. Never again.
Wintel decided that they don't process relevant data at all since the user
in most cases has noc chance to backup his data to something useful (no
1,44MB Disk please). Backing up a Windows so that it can be reinstalled
on a possibly different hard disk or machine is another story. Almost
impossible. No Problem on Linux or *BSD...
I've heard very good things about CrashPlan. They let you run on local disks or LAN
machines for free, but they also have a pretty attractive offsite solution. Never used
them, but Neil Gaiman does. :-)
On OS X, TIme Machine is fantastic. It's actually brilliantly simple; it just makes
hard links to the files for each iteration (except the modified ones, which it copies) so
that you have a working image for each backup that is indistinguishable from a
non-incremental backup (and the hard links only take up the space of an inode each).
It's so simple that I'm surprised I'd never seen it anywhere else.
- Dave