[Discuss] Filesystem(s) for multi-OS, whole house backup?

[Jack Coats]

I use crashplan, which is a commercial wrapper on rsync with encryption.  I
back it up twice.  One can be taken offsite, and the second is the 'local'
backup, kept online at home.

One of the backups can be removed and taken offsite.  All the backups are
compressed and encrypted before being sent over the network (local or 'open
internet').

Permissions seem to be kept OK, but I am just playing windows & linux.  I
 don't backup OSes, and just user files (docs, pix, text, misc stuff but
not base system).

I have had to do restores on occasion and things have worked well for me.

I have heard of horror stories about folks thinking any of the commercial
backups, including crashplan, will restore 'everything like it was', and
this is not so.  Crashplan has in the last several months had a few reports
of problems with a few files that were backed up being non-re-storable.
 This seems to be due to a corrupted index or datafile.  Normally this self
corrects by requesting the same file be backed up at the next backup
period, but if it IS the only copy, and a restore is requested before the
re-backup is completed, then the issue occurs.

This is why I suggest the 3-2-1-0 plan.  3 copies, on 2 different media, 1
offsite, 0 is the reminder to test restore occasionally.

I do not endorse Crashplan other than being a happy user.  It has holds.
 If Backblaze did Linux, I would probably use it instead.

><> ... Jack
--
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart... Colossians 3:23
"If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate" -
Henry J. Tillman
"Anyone who has never made a mistake, has never tried anything new." -
Albert Einstein
"You don't manage people; you manage things. You lead people." - Admiral
Grace Hopper, USN
Life is complex: it has a real part and an imaginary part. - Martin Terma


On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 11:09 AM, Daniel Barrett <dbarrett at blazemonger.com>wrote:

>
> I'm seeking advice on disaster recovery for all the computers in my house
> together (Linux, Windows, Mac), about 3TB of data.  Right now, I back up
> all the computers via rsync each night, pulling the files from all the
> systems into a Linux server that writes them to a USB ext3 hard drive. (I
> can then put the drive into a safety deposit box.) Administratively, it's a
> simple, scalable system controlled by a single computer: there's no
> configuration on the other systems except SSH access. But it's not ideal
> for several reasons:
>
> 1. Restoring the files is not point-and-click: you need Linux knowledge
> (that my family doesn't have). If the computers were lost in a disaster and
> also I died, my family would have a very hard time recovering files from
> this drive. They can't just plug the USB drive into a Mac and recover
> everything.
>
> 2. The backup is missing any extended file attributes from NTFS or Mac OS,
> since the USB drive is ext3.
>
> I'm wondering if other list members have a better solution. I can think of
> several improvements, but I don't know which ones are best (or if there are
> others):
>
> Approach A: "ext3 everywhere." Install software on all Mac systems to read
> ext3, and on all Windows systems to read ext3 and Mac. Now all systems can
> read the backup drive in the event of disaster.
>
> Approach B: "multiple filesystems and writers." Partition the USB drive to
> have NTFS and Mac partitions, and mount it writable on all systems. Have
> the Windows and Mac systems write their own backups to these partitions,
> instead of having backups by "pull" onto the Linux server.  Probably also
> requires Approach A so any computer can read any file.
>
> Approach C: Start investigating systems like Bacula that claim to work on
> all three OSes.  But I don't know if this produces, in the end, a USB drive
> backup that can just be plugged into a Mac for restoral.
>
> I should also mention that this USB drive is not my sole backup system.  We
> also have a NAS that all the systems write to: the Macs use Time Machine
> and the Linux & Windows systems using rsync. However, the NAS is too large
> to keep in a safety deposit box.  I could copy the entire contents of the
> NAS onto a USB drive for safety-deposit-box backup, I suppose.
>
> I'd be grateful for any helpful advice or direction. Thanks.
>
> --
> Dan Barrett
> dbarrett at blazemonger.com
>
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