Backup or folder duplication

[Roland]

Hello,

I liked the product so far, but there are still some questions I have.
Is there a possibility that data on a Server harddrive is automatically duplicated to another drive.
I can imagine that when a hardrive fails and you have to change it with a new one, that you want to resque the important data on it.
Or do you have to worry about RAID configurations before you install Amahi HDA.
I could chose for SATA Raid configuration but what about my USB Harddrive's?
Or can I schedule backups for Music, Books to another Harddrive or USB Harddrive?

Kind Regards

Roland Roos
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

[gmw]

The options you suggest are all valid.
At this stage there is no automatic backup of the files you put on the HDA.
I believe there are many tools to facilitate this (I personally use a RAID configuration).

[alfnoid]

This is the only thing keeping me leaning towards Windows home server.
An automagic copy of all files from one physical disk to another physical disk would be awesome to see!!

[cpg]

This is the only thing keeping me leaning towards Windows home server.
An automagic copy of all files from one physical disk to another physical disk would be awesome to see!!

maybe someone (you?) can integrate rsnapshot!?

[rgmhtt]

It would not be all that difficult to use rsync locally and run it nightly via cron.

I even think the rsync man page has all the basics for this!

[moredruid]

uhm, lots of options, of which 2 are very easy.
1 - hardware based (your mainboard might not support this) redundancy: RAID mirroring. The RAID controller will mirror all your data. This halves your disk space and works best with 2 identical drives. How does it halve your diskspace? The OS will see only 1 drive and the RAID controller commits each write to both drives (duplicate). Usually your OS sees both drives, sometimes as 1 volume, sometimes as 2 disks - this depends on driver support and other things.

2 - software based redundancy: you schedule a dd in cron. dd (disk duplicate) is a very powerful command. the PBA functionality of Amahi uses this over the network if I'm not mistaken.
Say you have 2 drives, 1 with your data on it that you want to copy to a 2nd drive.
you can then issue the following command to make an exact duplicate of the first disk to the second disk:

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

NOTE: don't copy this without thinking! make sure that you know what stuff is on which drive first. linux usually counts like this: /dev/sda (1st drive) /dev/sdb (2nd drive) /dev/sdc (3rd drive) etc.
numbers behind the drive names indicate partitions. So the 2nd partition on your 3rd disk would look like this: /dev/sdc2

If you're using LVM your partitioning may look very different, but a raw (byte for byte) copy tool like dd will ignore that and just copy what's on the disk.

Oh, and before I forget: after you make your first backup TEST it! I don't know how many people have faithfully backed up their systems without checking if restore works... and when a drive crashes they note that their backup is corrupted. You don't want to get burned that way, trust me. schedule a weekly full backup if you go the software way and do a restore every once in a while (say monthly or every 2 months).

[nemolomen]

I've been using fwbackups (installed from the F9 repository) to backup my shares along with /etc, /home and /var. Specifically, I'm using the rsync option, which makes a duplicate of the file system structure on another drive.

The only downside is that it needs an X desktop to use it, so to set it up, make changes or view the log, I need to open a VNC session, which isn't really a big deal.

It is written in python, which makes it "cross-platform" but I haven't tried using it on another OS yet.

You can find more info here: http://www.diffingo.com/oss/fwbackups

[moredruid]

nice, and thanks for sharing your experience!

[relrobber]

rsync is better to use for regular backups than dd because it only copies the changes to files, which means it takes far less time (after the initial backup). here is a link w/ alot of info on using rsync as an automated backup tool: http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

[ipdemons]

I think fwbackups is a great solution to this much needed problem. I've installed it and am having trouble getting to to run at login. I've tried adding it in the System > Personal > sessions > startup programs menu, as well ass adding it to rc.local, but when I login as root, it won't autostart. I really need it to start automatically after boot/login. Does anyone know how I can accomplish this?