Simple Linux Desktop Backup Strategy

Once in a while I panic about backups. As a web developer most of my creative is hosted somewhere, but what about all those pictures? Without an OFF SITE backup I risk loosing pretty much every photo of my kid that I have!

Back when I was a windows user, I solved the problem with a Carbonite account. Carbonite.com allows you unlimited online backup for under $50 / year. I’m sure there are other companies out there offering various services ( including my old buddy Joe at Tilana.com ) but NOBODY is doing a good job of marketing such a service to the home Linux user.

There are options of course. Amazon S3 storage is good one, although when talking about around 100gig between music and pictures, that can get pricey.

In the end, I realized that I could keep things VERY simple.

Having moved on to PCs with SATA drives, I have a surprising number of 250gig IDE drives kicking around. That coupled with the fact that I actually GO “off site” nearly every day to my office at The Fuel Team means that keeping it simple just got simpler.

The plan? To just do a nightly sync to external drives at my home and work machine, then switch them back and forth weekly. Voila! Worst case scenario, a weeks worth of stuff if the house burns down! Me likey. Not only does it give me good backup but it allows me to listen to my monster music collection at work.

Of course, it’s got to be a tidy solution as well as a simple one, so UPS have just delivered my new drive enclosures. I had two already, but one of them is a brick of a thing ( Coolmax NAS ), so I decided to buy two matching ones - then I don’t have to switch power supplies back and forth.

It’s running now - connected by firewire.

rsync is one killer command line file sync utility, and that’s what I’m using over here. I have a cron job as follows:

0 2 * * * /usr/bin/rsync -rtlzv --progress -l --exclude=.beagle/* --exclude=.local/share/Trash/* --exclude=.thumbnails/* /home/MYLOGIN/ /media/disk/MACHINENAME/

The easiest way to create a cronjob, and have it run as root is to type:

sudo cronttab -e

in a terminal, and add a line like you see above.

This one backs up everything in my home directory apart from useless stuff every night at 2am.