Backup is vitally important, and you should do it as regularly as possible. There’s nothing worse than losing valuable data. However, individual backup needs vary, so different strategies and software packages are required.
This column describes the onsite backup strategy I use. This technique is supplemented (not replaced) with my offsite backup strategy, which uses a combination of rsync and Amazon’s S3, which was described here a short time ago.
I have four IDE hard drives, each 320 GB in size, and each dedicated to a particular kind of data (yes, a move to 500 GB SATA drives is imminent). The name of each drive corresponds to its mount point in /media, as shown in the table.
TABLE ONE: A map of the hard drives on the author’s desktop system
Drive name
Mount point
data
/media/data
movies
/media/movies
music
/media/music
music-rock
/media/music-rock
In addition to the four data drives, I have four backup drives, each with its own corresponding mount point, too: /media/data-copy, /media/movies-copy, /media/music-copy, and /media/music-rock-copy.
Each drive is in its own enclosure. After trying many different enclosures, I finally found what I consider to be the best of breed: the AMS VENUS DS-2316CBK Aluminum 3.5″ USB & 1394 Black External Enclosure. Priced at about $50 at NewEgg, this is a sturdy enclosure that supports both USB 2 and FireWire. Best of all, there’s a fan on the bottom to keep things cool.
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