My home machine's main partitions are mirrored to two drives with software RAID-1. That protects against the most typical kind of hardware failure, where one drive dies. If that happens I can stick in a new drive and be up and running in a day with no loss. Important files (e.g. my thesis) get rsynced to another machine by a daily cron job. That protects against a lot of the scenarios the RAID doesn't. In the case of my thesis, it's going from my desktop machine at school to a fileserver which is itself backed up by the systems people here. The basic design goal: the backups have to happen without my intervention because if I were required to do something regularly, it wouldn't happen.
Then on a much slower schedule, when I feel like doing it, I burn either my home directory or my entire file tree to write-once optical media (CDs until recently, DVDs now). That's both for backup and as an archive, so I can go back and look at what I was doing in the past.
These measures have seen me through a number of hardware failures, software failures, and human errors over the years. They're certainly not perfect, but the big thing is that I can really keep them up on an ongoing basis, unlike some of the other backup measures I've seen people attempt, which end up not really being sustained.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-05-21 05:49 pm (UTC)Then on a much slower schedule, when I feel like doing it, I burn either my home directory or my entire file tree to write-once optical media (CDs until recently, DVDs now). That's both for backup and as an archive, so I can go back and look at what I was doing in the past.
These measures have seen me through a number of hardware failures, software failures, and human errors over the years. They're certainly not perfect, but the big thing is that I can really keep them up on an ongoing basis, unlike some of the other backup measures I've seen people attempt, which end up not really being sustained.