I would really like to have some backups of my home network.
I am currently concerned with this set of machines:
legion: My personal desktop. Running Ubuntu Breezy / Windows XP Pro. 150G linux partition, 150G windows.
kazekage: My old desktop, an ad-hoc "media center" PC that's hooked up to the TV; also serves as experimental / shared server / guest computer. 100G linux partition. Hoary right now, probably upgraded to Breezy soon. 60G XP partition that will hardly ever be used.
atuin: One of these things. Technically it runs some kind of linux, but it's a hermetically sealed box as far as I'm concerned. It's a 1T disk over SMB (samba, but no CIFS/UNIX extensions).
zelda: Print server. MacOS X (Jaguar). Runs VNC; headless. 40G HFS+ drive.
trogdor: laptop. dual boot Ubuntu Breezy / XP home. 60G linux partition, 20G windows.
There are a few other machines which may or may not be interesting to back up comprising about 200G more, all in linux.
The medium I will be backing up to is DVD-Rs, which I can get at $0.08/G - that would make the full price of one backup (with all disks full) $153.19.
I am looking for a backup system that will allow me to make this sort of backup with easy, selective restoration. Ideal would be a system where each individual DVD would contain an ISO filesystem with the actual files being backed up stored directly there, and some kind of directory-tree based index where I could make labels that would allow me to find a file. If anything in my TB drive blows, I am not going to want to buy a new one with the same capacity and then spend 6 days swapping DVDs trying to find the one file I need.
I don't mind if it's proprietary software, as long as it's reasonably priced, but I despair of finding anything that isn't open-source, since this amount of data sounds like an "enterprise" problem, and I am definitely not going to pay "enterprise" prices to back up my MP3s.
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While it might be a bit on the geekish side of things, I've been using DAR with some success so far. It does incremental backups and whatnot that I can setup a script to automagically burn to a DVD/CD.
Ubuntu/Debian has it prepackaged and happy.
legion: My personal desktop. Running Ubuntu Breezy / Windows XP Pro. 150G linux partition, 150G windows.
I wonder, what you would be storing on those partitions! I am planning to install Windows with 30/10gb split (30 being FAT), so that I could access my media files (without slow reads) from both the OS.
Well, for one example of what I'm storing on those drives, 10 different VMWare hosts, each with its own 40 GB "drive", some of them uncompressed for better performance. 30 or 40 games installed on the Windows side, each taking up more than 2G. A full installation of 3 different versions of MSVC, each weighing in at 10G or so. It adds up :).
I have the 1TB drive I mentioned for my media files, networked so all my machines can access it. It's a bit slower than my local SATA drives, but then again, even movie playback takes only 100K/s or so, and even an an *extremely* slow network drive can do 1M/s.
But... you are using FAT!?? Windows has enough problems as it is, I don't need to give it more by not using NTFS :).
I haven't tried it yet, but this looks like exactly what I need.
NTFS write support in linux is not yet stable. But I can take the risk :-)
The main issue with windows filesystems is lack of unix permissions.
I've been planning to get similar setup for my network - lots of centralized network-accessible disk. It seems to me that really backing up that much data is not going to work with DVDs. At least for a person as lazy as me.
I think I'll just make a fairly redundant RAID setup, since I'm more worried about the life current IDE drives than natural catastrophes or user errors.
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