One of the major major problems with hardware is it’s really good way of messing up your day when it fails, doubly so for a hard-drive failure.
Michelle’s laptop goes bye bye…
Last night my fiance’s laptop finally bit the dust, along with her removable drive, god I felt bad!. Thankfully I’d backed up most of her files to my StrongSpace account but that still didn’t kill the problem of what we’d lost. Eugh, what a horrible feeling, but you live and you learn.
The sudden need to get her a new laptop and me to build a development server for my Rails work prompted me to think how’d I backup my box in event of total failure.
SVN Rocks!
The obvious one is to keep it all under SubVersion and check-out changes to a remote store, which I thankfully do with my MacBook easily (SVN you rock!).
Linux Disk Imaging
But what about when you’ve setup your server perfectly and the idea of reinstalling everything just doesn’t make commercial sense?
Well then you schedule Snapshot Images for the box. Basically a snapshot is exactly that, a photocopy of everything on the target at a specific point in time; much like SQL 2005’s backup methods. You can schedule the system to take copies of it’s main drive and then copy those over to another drive, even burn that to disc, so in the event it all goes down, you can simply restore from the image and in no time at all your up and running again.
Thankfully my two SliceHost server’s have this built-in, they schedule Daily, Weekly and one when-i-want-it copy.
Done a little bit of research and turned up two good Linux Imaging tools for your own setup,
When I’ve got my development box built i’m gonna try Mondo Rescue first, sounds like a more mature product.
Will let you know how things go,
