Cautionary backup story

[DBeckett]

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I made two copies of my one .virtualbox VDI a couple of years ago, one on external HDD and another on DVD. I've never bothered to back it up since then. It's replaceable.

I keep other large things and the few ISOs I have on a special partition for such things, but don't back them up either. I either don't care about them that much or they're replaceable, not worth tying up a bunch of disk space.

I am however religious about making fairly frequent images.

[lucky9]

you'll certainly get a lot more life out of the top quality discs, but they don't last forever. archiving companies, like iron mountain, have been rethinking the use of optical discs for longterm storage because they do fail.

Archiving companies are in the business of making money. So if you think that they'd not exaggerate any faults of any other solution, and/or enhance any benefits of their own solution, I've got a bridge I want to sell you.

I might worry beyond 20 years for top-quality media stored correctly. If I needed to archive family photographs I'd expect more than 100 years for gold archive disks.

The people (customers) you are talking about expect/want as unlimited a time as possible.

The only truly safe method (for home users) at present is to make copies at intervals. Keep multiple copies. Have at least one copy off-site. For the home a good optical burner is tech that's in reach.

There are better technologies for archiving than DVD or BlueRay-type burners.

My brother (who runs Windows and MacOS) has had 4 HDDs quit on his Windows machine in the last 8 or 9 years. He's not real good at backing up. His solution was to use a mirrored array. He hasn't lost a bit of data in those years.

[Silent Observer]

Okay, I'm convinced -- I've got two external drives, at least one of which is reliable (the other had a failure and has some bad blocks most likely related to the computer it was mounted in falling out of a van onto concrete, but with the bad blocks marked/locked out, it should be okay); neither one is large by modern standards, but both are big enough to do multiple "live" mirrors of my entire MEPIS install (root and complete /home partition), never mind compressed backups -- though neither comes close to being able to back up my NTFS volumes (one has almost 200 GB of photos on it, for instance). Next time I have a few dollars to spare, I'll get a new terabyte drive (around $75 shipped and sales taxed) and drop into the case with the damaged drive and be able to back up my terabyte NTFS drive (probably two rotating backups, though data on that drive doesn't change rapidly any more except for e-mail, bookmarks, etc. that are still there from before MEPIS).

For insurance, I'd like one of the MEPIS backups to be literally live, bootable and fully mirrored for both root and /home -- I'll start another thread in another location on how to do that (I can think of a couple potential ways). A USB external drive is pretty slow, but it'd be better than a thumb drive, because persistence is the normal setup for a hard drive -- and lots better than a live DVD, especially since my machine doesn't have a DVD drive.

[eemaestro]

Thanks for writing. I haven't yet adopted the practice of using symlinks, so your story won't apply to me. But am surprised to hear luckybackup already comes with MEPIS. I understand it is a user interface for rsync. I have never used it, but will give it a whirl when it comes time to backing up files. First, I will look for a tutorial on the web.