Backup options for home

[Ben Eisenbraun]

On Sat, Nov 08, 2008 at 09:05:17PM -0500, John Abreau wrote:
> I remember back in the '80s somebody marketed a backup solution for
> the early Macintosh that was essentially a barcode reader. The backup
> software would print the data in a high-density format that the barcode
> reader could scan back in to restore.

There's a similar solution available today:
http://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/index.html

> And for seriously long-term archiving, nothing so far has beaten the record
> of cuneiform carved into stone tablets.  :-)

Thinking of storage designed for exteremely long lifetimes and harsh
conditions brings to mind the messages placed on the NASA missions that
went beyond our solar system.

Pioneer used gold-anodized aluminum for their plaque:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

The Voyager program used phonograph records made of gold:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

I've often thought about trying to back up information in the Google cache.
I.e. you spit out your file encoded into ASCII text and made available as a 
web page that had something interesting enough about it for Google to
cache.  Google expires the caches occasionally, so you'd have to make 
sure the crawler came along and re-indexed your files, and restores would 
be somewhat tricky...

There's a bunch of home-rolled scripts out there that will let you back 
up files to your Gmail account.

I have a disk in a server in my friend's basement.  I keep a nightly 
backup on a local disk in my basement server and once a week push a
differential backup across to that disk at my friend's house.  I'm just 
using rsync for this, but products like Box Backup look interesting:
http://www.boxbackup.org/

-b

--
the imagination imitates; it is the critical spirit that creates.
                                                    <oscar wilde>