[MLB-WIRELESS] Data Recovery tools?

[Tim Hogard]

> 
> actually - backups count as my most common question I encounter when I'm
> used as tech support - at work we use industrial strength solutions -Veritas
> netbackup and multi-petabyte storage... kinda rather too much for home
> solutions...
> 
> I have no backups at all myself and need to do something about that...
> 
> so... what backup solutions do people recommend?

The real question is "what is backup?"

There are a few major reasons why we need backups:
1) Opps, I deleted taht file (or Opps Word fixed that document)
2) I wonder what the file was like 3 months ago
3) The hard drive dies
4) The house insulation catches fire.

For reasons 1 & 2, its is best to have local copies even on the local machine
with some sort of revision thing.  I use Timemachine on my mac which backups my
documents to another place on the same disk.  That is quick and painless but
is useless when the disk dies.

The most common major failure is when the disk dies so RAID has become more
popular but it seems to me that RAID controlers are only
slightly less likely to die than hard drives that run 24x7.  It also has
no advantage for fire, flood or lightning damage which will kill all the
copies at once.  So far I'm not sure I know of a situation where RAID has
helped a home user since it complicates everything.

To protect agsint total destruction, you need an off site backup.  Modern drives
are just too big to copy except onto another drive so the only real option is
to copy the raw disk image from the internal computer to an exteranl disk.  There
are tricks to speed that up, but a full copy means you just verified your existing
disk is readable.  The problem then becomes what happens when your main disk fails
when your doing a copy?  So you need at least two backup disks.

My solution is I rsync stuff to a server that I have located in a data center in
earthquake prone LA, copy nice to have data to DVDs, rsync working documents between
my laptop and home system and then use time machine to keep track of historical 
changes.

For businesses (and more and more people now), there is a 5th reason to copy
things and that is for offical record keeping archives.  I think paper printouts
work best for that in most situations.

-tim