My current backup strategy is to upload some stuff on my shell accounts and copy other stuff on my external Firwire Harddisk.
Today I tried to do a backup from my Epia system, which has no firewire, so i connected the harddisk via USB. Did you remember that USB in FreeBSD sucks? Of course hotplugging didn’t work and results in bazillion messages on the console:
Sep 4 10:14:16 via kernel: umass0: BBB bulk-in clear stall failed, IOERROR
Sep 4 10:14:16 via kernel: umass0: BBB bulk-out clear stall failed, IOERROR
and hanging of every disk access. After the reboot the disk worked, I was able to dump the / filesystem. But when i tried to dump the /usr filesystem the box paniced.
Now I am looking for a better (reliable working) way to backup this system since Firewire is not an option.
Does anybody of you use tape backups? I got a DDS3-tape drive, but I never used it, as I need to get tapes somewhere. Should I try to install a professional backup solution like bacula? Or should I just use rsync to copy stuff from the Hard Disk to another machine.
Hi Arved,
I have a quite simple solution: I have an old machine with a DDS3 Tape in it running FreeBSD 4.something. That machine is started with a cheapo clock timer at 2:00am and switched off at 6:00am. All other hosts copy worthy material via reoback (rsync would do, too) to that host and a simple cronjob (script) starts the backup to the tape afterwards. I only feed it with a tape every few days because I have the fallback of the harddisks in that backup host. I like that solution, though there are more professional ones like amanda or so which I am too lazy to implement at home.
Have Fun,
DD