[Leica] World of pain - Mark's backup system (longish)

[mark at whitedogs.co.uk (Mark Pope)]

Here's what I do.

Photos are held on our main Windows PC.  When I import photos into 
Lightroom, the raw images are backed up to a USB connected external HDD.
When Lightroom fires up, the catalogue is backed up to the network share 
on the Linux server.  This is a separate backup to the one I'm about to 
describe below.

I have a cheap PC running as  Linux server.  It has two RAID1 HDDs for 
the system, which also act as my network storage.

My backup strategy revolves around an open-source package called 
BackupPC which runs on the Linux server.  There is a third 1.5TB hard 
drive in the Linux server which I have set up with 1TB and 0.5TB partitions.
Every day, BackupPC polls the devices on my network, including the 
RAIDed disks in the server and instigates a backup. You can choose from 
a number of transport/backup methods.  I use Rsync.  To run Rsync under 
windows you need something called Cygwin, which is basically a Unix 
emulator.  It will choose to either a full or incremental backup.  The 
beauty of BackupPC is that it uses compression and pooling to make the 
best possible use of the filestore that's available - in my case a 1TB 
disk.  This can be extended as needs dictate.

Every Saturday morning I run an Archive.  This involves archiving the 
backups collected by BackupPC onto an external 1TB drive.  The archive 
process is a part of the BackupPC package.  I have three drives that get 
rotated.  What I do then is take "last week's" backup next door - so I 
have an off-site backup, swapping it with the "the week before last's" 
backup.  The archives on the external drives are compressed TAR archives 
- one for each machine/disk that's backed up.

The archive disks are really my last line of defence, meant to protect 
me against totalloss of my PCs and server/backup system.
I have had a disk failure which meant I lost my backups.  I didn't need 
to use the archives though as once I had rebuilt the system, BackupPC 
just polled the machines on the network and after a couple of days, 
things were back  to normal.

At the moment I'm backing up a Windows XP machine with a 250Gb and 500Gb 
HDD, a Linux workstation with 250Gb HDD, two Macbooks (I had originally 
earmarked the 500Gb partition on the server for running Time Machine 
backups, but getting Time Machine to work was just too painful, so I use 
Rsync) and finally the RAIDed 250Gb drives in the server.

BackupPC is a brilliant piece of FREE software.  Last week I 
accidentally deleted the www directory on the server (I also use the 
server as test web server).  I was able to restore the files in about 
two minutes.

The total cost of my backup solution was around ?700 in total and this 
includes having to additional disks after a a failure.  Higher spec 
hardware would be nice, but the system works pretty well as it is.

I'm beginning to wonder whether there is a commercial opportunity here...
Thoughts?



Mark Pope,
Swindon, Wilts
UK

Homepage               http://www.monomagic.co.uk
Blog                   http://www.monomagic.co.uk/blog
Picture a week (2010)  http://www.monomagic.co.uk/index.php?gallery=paw/2010
Picture a week (2009)  http://www.monomagic.co.uk/index.php?gallery=paw/2009
                (2008) 
http://www.monomagic.co.uk/index.php?gallery=paw/2008



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