[ubuntu-uk] External hard disks and backup strategies

[Tom Bamford]

Hi David,

I've always found support for USB mass storage devices to be excellent 
in Ubuntu. I haven't come across a drive that isn't automatically 
recognised and mounted, no matter what filesystem you choose to use on 
it. Even my SE mobile works as a card reader on Ubuntu out of the box. 
If you label the partition on the drive it will get mounted in 
/media/LABEL, otherwise Ubuntu will use /media/disk, followed by disk1, 
disk2 etc if you disconnect and reconnect it between reboots. You can 
safely identify a drive by referring to /dev/disk/by-uuid or 
/dev/disk/by-id and mounting the appropriate symlink manually.

We have a 500GB NAS hard drive in a cheap enclosure. You're right, they 
use a stripped down Linux kernel with Samba, ftpd etc, with a web 
interface for configuring it as you would a home router. I wouldn't 
recommend one though, they give poor performance compared to USB2 and 
you're at the mercy of the frankenstein daemons running on the box. The 
ftp server on ours dies a horrible death when you try to push lots of 
small files without giving it time to breathe. Ours will only use FAT32 
filesystem on the drive as well, which is annoying to say the least.

I'm currently looking at backup solutions myself, one that looks 
promising for me is backupninja (I think it's in the universe 
repositories). It's a highly configurable backup script that can sit 
silent until you connect your drive or it gets run by cron. It can 
automate rsync, plus it has nifty support for, among other things, 
Maildirs and SQL databases, which it can export and include in the backup.

The dual hard disk solution sounds good, but I'd also want to make a 
periodic optical backup to DVD or CD - something not as easily affected 
by water, electricity, magnetism and shock (I am very clumsy sometimes).

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Tom


David M wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Now that external hard disks are cheap, I'm thinking about getting an
> external hard disk so that I can keep a backup of my data. In fact, I'm
> even thinking of getting *two* for alternate use so that if the worst
> should happen and my system dies while backing up my data I haven't
> toasted both my data and my sole backup..
>
> When it comes to external disks, it seems I have the choice of not only
> a plain-old hard disk connected via USB, but also the possibility of NAS
> (networked-attached storage) where the hard disk is connected to my
> network, and contains a stripped-down OS so that it presents itself as a
> fileserver (I presume?).
>
> Does anybody know how well-supported either of these technologies are in
> Ubuntu? In particular, I'd also want to format the disk in ext3 format
> as I have no need or desire for MSWindows filesystems.
>
>
> On the one hand, NAS seems neat, but I don't have a home network, only a
> cheapo multi-port ADSL modem/router. These things tend to be a bit
> gnarly (and unfriendly) to set up at the best of times, so I don't know
> how easy - let alone whether - it would be possible to set the
> modem/router up to allow my computer to see a NAS disk. And given the 
> horrible potential for unwittingly sharing the contents of a NAS disk 
> with the entire internet, I'd have to be very careful! I gather that it
> is generally the case that any configuration of the NAS box can usually
> be done via a browser front-end; obviously any disk which requires 
> Windows software is a no-no.
>
> On the other hand, a plain-old USB hard disk seems the simpler option. I
> would naively assume that as USB is now well-proven technology, these 
> would work just fine with Ubuntu, but is that the case? How easy would
> it be to automate backups to such a disk? Would it mount with a
> persistent mount point, or would it change with every unplug or system 
> reboot?
>
>
> Then there is the question of what backup strategy I should actually
> use. I was assuming that an automated rsync every week would be the
> easiest, but perhaps there are other possibilities? Something automated,
> once configured, without requiring user intervention is an absolute 
> must: the whole point of doing backups is that I don't have to remember
> to do it!
>
> I mentioned above that having two external hard disks, alternating
> between current latest backup and disk being backed-up to, seemed a good
> strategy, ensuring that I always have one backup at all times.
>
> Alternatively, perhaps some kind of mirror RAID strategy would be worth
> considering, although that would seem to require me to have four hard
> disks to maintain my "always one spare backup" strategy (and is outwith
> my budget!). I also don't know whether USB HDs or NAS HDs are RAID-able.
>
>
> Can anybody offer any advice on this?
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> David.
>
>