I’ve been getting that itch recently to look over my backup system. Some things are working very well, and some… not so much. At the moment, I’m using Dropbox to sync about 25 GB of data between two computers at work and two computers at home. About a third of that is tar.gz’s of my home folder on both office machines, generated every Monday morning. The next 1/3rd is personal data I’d rather not lose, and the remaining 1/3rd is work documents. This makes it easy to work wherever I am. It also gets me 5 copies of the data for disaster recovery if you count the copy on the Dropbox servers themselves. It also functions as a backup, as you can restore point-in-time backups.

While Dropbox covers my working data (other than very large files), I need a backup for the OS’s. I don’t yet have a good one for my Solaris or Linux boxes, but for the Mac’s, I’m running Time Machine to local SATA drives. (I abandoned the Time Machine on Disk Images silliness a few weeks ago. It was far too slow when doing photo work, often taking 20 or 25 minutes to backup the changes. The host it was backing up to was memory and I/O bound – not a good mix.)

I also burn DVD-R’s every month of the tar.gz files created by my backup routines, as well as a tar.gz of the Dropbox folder itself, excluding the backups. Since most of what I do is text, it currently compresses down to about 8 GB. I include MD5 checksums of each backed up archive, to make sure I can verify my data later.

That covers all of my normal data. I also have a ZFS based file server which I copy all disk images, movies, music and other things I didn’t create (which I can re-rip from DVD or CD, or can re-download). I also push a disaster recovery copy of my Dropbox folder to the ZFS server, and use snapshots to manage the revisions.

Ironically, it’s the easiest stuff that isn’t working right. I mentioned awhile ago that Time Machine occasionally tries to back up my whole disk again. I’ve had to run in and beat it about the head quite a few times to get rid of teh stoopids. Looking at it now, there is over 130 GB of data that it’s backed up, incorrectly. My real concern is when it fills up the disk Time Machine will happily delete all the older backups up to and including the last mammoth backup. This defeats the purpose of Time Machine, which is to give you a nice “slice of time” backup. The other problem is that I use that drive as my scratch drive for Aperture and Photoshop work, as editing directly on the network isn’t quite fast enough. Once the drive fills up with Time Machine backups, I’ll have a real problem to deal with.

The next problem is that my alternate Solaris server is dreadfully low on memory (1 GB) and only has a 100bT NIC. It’s an older box, so memory isn’t cheap – a 2GB DIMM is $120, which is roughly twice the price of fully buffered ECC DIMMs is for my Mac Pro. I’m trying to find the right use for it – which at the moment is running a smaller 750 GB mirrored pool for photo backups. It’s slow, but it works. I’m honestly tempted to load XBMC on it and see if it can decode the large MKV’s I rip from my DVD’s. It would make the system a lot more useable, and if I can find a remote for it, it would pass the wife-friendly test.

What I’d really like to do is get a second internal drive for the Mac Pro for photo editing. That’s going to run me around $75. Next, I’d like to go ahead and get the SATA card and the drives to do the faster photo pool I mentioned in my Photo Management post. Of course, that is very much discretionary, and I’d probably prefer to get a second monitor first.