thoth's Journal: Backups

Ok not much exciting stuff going on with my home infrastructure.

One thing I finally did do is get a better (more comprehensive) backup system in place. I've been using Time Machine on my Mac Book Pro, since it is easy to setup and works like a champ. But I like to keep my files centralized, because I want to essentially mirror my documents to my linux notebook.

After fiddling around with Backup PC, I realized that was overkill for my extremely modest needs. I wound up just making some quick-and-dirty rsync scripts, and have those execute once a day via cron. So now my fileserver grabs from the Mac Book Pro, and my linux notebook grabs from my fileserver. I essentially have 3 backups of my files: the master copy on my Mac (which I consider my main system), a copy on a USB drive via Time Machine, a copy on my file server, and copy on my linux notebook.

Actually that isn't all... some files are copied one more time: I subscribe to JungleDisk and sync my photos to "the cloud". It costs between $3.00 and $4.00 a month, which I feel is well worth it considering my photos are the data I basically cannot reconstruct at all. Sure I'd be bummed if I lost other files, but I literally cannot retake trips/vacations and reshoot pictures/movies, recontact people I've lost touch with, etc. The pictures are "priceless" enough for me to spend a whopping $50 a year backing up offsite.

On the OS front, I downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, and installed it into a Virtual Box VM. I grabbed Arch Linux and set that up in Virtual Box as well. More later after I fiddle around with both.