There have been a number of recent threads about the merit of RAID 0 arrays against single drive solutions, and reliabilty and RAID 1 setups. The debates have been interesting, but regardless of the best solution for a particular solution, the bottom line has always been the need for regular backups.
This got me thinking about my own backup strategy, which to be honest is pretty hit and miss. I back up critical data that I can't afford to loose as and when I think about it, but I don't generally back up my whole hard drive on the basis that I can realtively easily re-install my OS - but then I think about the pain of reconfiguring it, reloading and reconfiguring the applications and so I have been thinking about it some more.
There are some important decisions to make - which are inter-related. These are what to back up, when , the backup media, and the strategy. Really these things need to be considered at system build as partition layout can be optimised for backing up.
I am running a Linux system, but the principles are OS independent. On a Linux system, the minimum required is a backup of /var /home and /etc and possibly /root to capture application and user data and configuration data. That is a sizeable chunk of data, so possibly the backup solution is to just copy the whole hard disk to a USB hard drive, and then do incremental backups of the three directories mentioned on a regular basis, perhaps to DVD or CD. Another possibility is to take a clone of the root system disk when the system is built and configured and lock it away until the day the main system HD fails - a simple swap over and the system is back up.
On a windows machine I guess the minimum would be my documents, but again a clone of the built system on completion of the system build and application installation would again minimise a lot of the pain of system re-installation. Keeping user data on a separate partition makes back up of user data a little simpler.
tape solutions look the cheapest long term bulk storage, but the hardware is expensive - tape drives starting at about £250 up (perhaps Scan might like to do a Today only on some tape drives?) but the media is relatively cheap for the capacity.
Those are my thoughts on what is a complex subject - what do others think, and more interestingly, do for their backup solutions?
"A hard drive is a mechanical device - it is guaranteed to wear out and fail, the only unknown is when."


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