Personal DR

After my little '3 Keystrokes' fiasco I have deployed a more robust data protection and disaster recovery solution at home. This one is designed to be stupid-resistant. We'll see.

I now automatically background rsync all of my data to a simple 1 TB NAS device on our home GbE network. This device in-turn automatically synchronizes to a peer at the other end of our house. This way I am assured of a current backup unless my house completely burns down.

For off-site DR of my irreplaceable data, I now have two sets of 16 GB USB flash & 120 GB 2.5" USB hard drives. The flash (yes, I went overboard) holds copies of my critical files, while the HDD also includes my merely important files. One set stays in our safe deposit box, while the other set stays at home next to my keyboard and I synchronize these in less than a minute before I shut down my desktop each night. I plan to swap sets once a month or so - although this is definitely the weak spot in my plan.

I use SyncBackSE to manage the synchronization. There may be better home-use alternatives, but overall I am very impressed with the speed and functionality of this tool for my use.

While waiting (zzzzzz) for the initial transfers to complete, I was struck by the scope of the problem NetApp's customers face with several orders of magnitude more data. I have even more appreciation for why SnapMirror™ & SnapVault® are so popular!

Comments

[Daniel Holmes]

I just signed up a trial with a service called carbonite (add .com for their web site) to provide automatic offsite backup on my home PC. I just configure it to protect anything ever put under MyDocuments and it just works. Heard about it on the Kim Komando show. I'm up to date protected, even if my house burns down :-)