Dev-Picayune

Brandon has been talking since January about backups and backup philosophy (see Thoughts on backups and RAID and More proof that you should backup your online files). So, I’ve finally started on a path towards a more reasonable setup with regard to storage and backups. This ties well into my move to Ubuntu because I’ve had to think a little about OS stuff as well.

Among the comments I made on Brandon’s post, was that I felt backups should be done to an external drive. My reason for this is simple, if there is an emergency, the backup drive is easy to grab and go. All this said, though, and I am only willing to commit to a 200GB external drive. Realistically, this is not enough space to backup everything I want to backup but it’s a good start. So looking at what really needs to be backed up, I’ve got a few categories of information that has to be dealt with:

• Pictures – my most valuable data. They are both the negatives and the editing work that I do. If these are gone, they are gone. That’s really bad.
• Music – I am in the process of reripping all music. My plan is to rerip to flac files (if I find I am getting the additional results I need with regard to tags) and then transcode to mp3 or ogg as needed. But essentially, when I buy a CD, my plan is to rip it and then file the CD away. If I need a CD for the car, it’ll either be an mp3 CD or a backup copy of the audio CD.
• Scans – these are closely related to pictures, as they are scanned versions of paperwork we have filed and might need later.
• Documents – also like the scanned documents, these are our word documents and such.
• Emails – I’m an email packrat. I want all my emails. Forever!
• Projects – code stuff and web site templates…
• Misc Other – data like quicken or Grayson’s bloodsugar data or gps info
• Online Data – data (like blog entries) that exists only on a web service

So I’ve had to come up with places to store all these things where all computers can get to all the data and so also can be backed up. I decided that the external backup drive would be attached to my computer. This meant dealing with Linux. Since NTFS support is technically only read-only, I couldn’t really format the 200GB drive with NTFS. There are forums posts suggesting FAT32 is very inconsistent with Linux (and some would argue under Windows as well). So my compromise was to do ext3 on it and if I ever have to connect the external drive to a Windows machine, I’ll have to download the ext3 driver for it. It’s not ideal but it’s better than anything else I can come up with.

Another issue I’ve got to deal with is that since flac still results in some huge files, I am not going to back those up the same way. My plan is to burn those DVD (they don’t change) along with any mp3 or ogg files I have or transcode from flac. The trick will be cutting those to DVD frequently as they get added. The rest of the stuff will hopefully fit on the 200GB backup drive.

Stay tuned… in additional posts I’ll discuss how I’ve dealt with where the data is actually going to reside (i.e. how I’m going to deal with storing stuff remotely among the machines and still be able to access it) and how I end up implementing the backup processes. I’m still working on all that. I’ll also have to report back on my flac findings.

Technorati Tags: flac, backup, linux, ntfs, ext3, fat32