18 Dec
2003
18 Dec
'03
3:37 p.m.
Hey everyone,
I'm currently looking into a computer upgrade, including new
disks. As everyone here knows, more space is well worth it.
Unfortunately, money isn't unlimited ::-(.
Previously, I've always kept my disks in mirrored pairs to
ensure the death of one disk didn't cost me any data. But looking
around, I'm not sure if I wanna spring the $200 for a pair of 120G+
drives. But we all know I'll regret getting something smaller.
Does anyone here have some other clever solutions to getting
reliable archives of recordings? My ardour sessions, even for demos
quickly outpace what will reasonable fit on to CDs. DVD burners are
still way out of my price range. I'm plum out of ideas.
Thanks for any tips!
--
Ross Vandegrift
ross(a)willow.seitz.com
A Pope has a Water Cannon. It is a Water Cannon.
He fires Holy-Water from it. It is a Holy-Water Cannon.
He Blesses it. It is a Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
He Blesses the Hell out of it. It is a Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
He has it pierced. It is a Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
He makes it official. It is a Canon Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
Batman and Robin arrive. He shoots them.
18 Dec
18 Dec
4:51 p.m.
I got a bunch of 120G drives a few months ago for $80 each. Still $160
for a pair, but, less than $200. If you haven't already checked it
out: www.pricewatch.com is a good place to shop.
As far as protecting data ... My solution is to have one data disk
on my audio box and mirrored drives on my file server. This is, of
course, more expensive and a second box to maintain. I had thought
about mirrored drives on my workstation, but that doesn't protect me
from user error, i.e. accidentally deleting a file I didn't mean to.
The file server is a fairly new thing for me, but so far I did one
full scp from my workstation's audio drive to mirrored 120G drives on
the file server a week ago. My plan is to set up a nightly rsync job on
my workstation to move any new stuff to the file server.
Hope this helps. Backups are important. Many years ago, before I became
a linux user, I lost a half finished orchestration for wind ensemble of
a ~30 minute composition I was working on in Finale on my Mac when the
drive failed catastrophically.
On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 02:35:37PM -0500, Ross Vandegrift wrote:
Hey everyone,
I'm currently looking into a computer upgrade, including new
disks. As everyone here knows, more space is well worth it.
Unfortunately, money isn't unlimited ::-(.
Previously, I've always kept my disks in mirrored pairs to
ensure the death of one disk didn't cost me any data. But looking
around, I'm not sure if I wanna spring the $200 for a pair of 120G+
drives. But we all know I'll regret getting something smaller.
Does anyone here have some other clever solutions to getting
reliable archives of recordings? My ardour sessions, even for demos
quickly outpace what will reasonable fit on to CDs. DVD burners are
still way out of my price range. I'm plum out of ideas.
Thanks for any tips!
--
Ross Vandegrift
ross(a)willow.seitz.com
A Pope has a Water Cannon. It is a Water Cannon.
He fires Holy-Water from it. It is a Holy-Water Cannon.
He Blesses it. It is a Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
He Blesses the Hell out of it. It is a Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
He has it pierced. It is a Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
He makes it official. It is a Canon Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
Batman and Robin arrive. He shoots them.
5:20 p.m.
You can get an NEC DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW/CDR/RW for about $120 if you look
around. That's what I paid for mine (including shipping).
Jan
On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 13:35, Ross Vandegrift wrote:
Hey everyone,
I'm currently looking into a computer upgrade, including new
disks. As everyone here knows, more space is well worth it.
Unfortunately, money isn't unlimited ::-(.
Previously, I've always kept my disks in mirrored pairs to
ensure the death of one disk didn't cost me any data. But looking
around, I'm not sure if I wanna spring the $200 for a pair of 120G+
drives. But we all know I'll regret getting something smaller.
Does anyone here have some other clever solutions to getting
reliable archives of recordings? My ardour sessions, even for demos
quickly outpace what will reasonable fit on to CDs. DVD burners are
still way out of my price range. I'm plum out of ideas.
Thanks for any tips!
--
Ross Vandegrift
ross(a)willow.seitz.com
A Pope has a Water Cannon. It is a Water Cannon.
He fires Holy-Water from it. It is a Holy-Water Cannon.
He Blesses it. It is a Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
He Blesses the Hell out of it. It is a Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
He has it pierced. It is a Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
He makes it official. It is a Canon Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
Batman and Robin arrive. He shoots them.
5:57 p.m.
Hallo,
Jan Depner hat gesagt: // Jan Depner wrote:
You can get an NEC DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW/CDR/RW for about
$120 if you look
around. That's what I paid for mine (including shipping).
Ooh, but I've read that DVD is not really reliable, or at least not
proven to be reliable for archiving.
For large data amounts, probably good old tape is still the best.
But backups are for wimps. (Linus T.)
ciao
--
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__
6:26 p.m.
So far the DVD is reliable. But, as a friend of mine used to say, "if
it's not on tape, it's not" ;-)
Jan
On Thu, 2003-12-18 at 15:55, Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo,
Jan Depner hat gesagt: // Jan Depner wrote:
You can get an NEC DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW/CDR/RW for
about $120 if you look
around. That's what I paid for mine (including shipping).
Ooh, but I've read that DVD is not really reliable, or at least not
proven to be reliable for archiving.
For large data amounts, probably good old tape is still the best.
But backups are for wimps. (Linus T.)
ciao
--
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__ 
2 Jan
2 Jan
1:24 p.m.
Frank Barknecht wrote:
But backups are for wimps. (Linus T.)
to be exact, linus added something along the lines of "real men upload
their stuff and let the world mirror it". which seems the crucial part
of his approach. ;) tough luck for those w/o write access to
ftp.kernel.org....
--
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- Homer Simpson
Jörn Nettingsmeier
Kurfürstenstr 49, 45138 Essen, Germany
http://spunk.dnsalias.org (my server)
http://www.linuxaudiodev.org (Linux Audio Developers)
20 Dec
20 Dec
5:09 a.m.
On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Ross Vandegrift wrote:
around, I'm not sure if I wanna spring the $200
for a pair of 120G+
drives. But we all know I'll regret getting something smaller.
[...]
Does anyone here have some other clever solutions to
getting
reliable archives of recordings? My ardour sessions, even for demos
I'm just thinking of getting a new pair of 80GB drives (best 'GB per
euro' ratio ;)). 80GB won't last forever, but not a huge problem if you
have a usable archive/backup system. (*)
What I've done is to buy a USB-IDE rack (I have one A-Link model, works
pretty nicely, although sometimes freezes the kernel if in SMP mode :().
This allows me to mount my old IDE drives (and there's a lot of them) as
backup drives, and thanks to USB I can do this without having to shutdown
the system. And even the oldest drives (2.5GB bigfoot still working) are
bigger than CDs and DVDs.
As the drives are not physically connected while not used, data is safe
from software/user errors, disk space is cheap (less than one euro/dollar
per GB). And much more practical to use than burnable CD/DVDs.
(*) For personal use I prefer to use manual-rsync mirroring
instead of RAID. Usually when I've lost data, the cause was
software errors (me working on or testing kernel drivers) or
a user error. RAID won't help in these cases, but semi-automatic
rsync-mirroring most often will...
--
http://www.eca.cx
Audio software for Linux!
5:38 a.m.
Kai Vehmanen wrote:
On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Ross Vandegrift wrote:
Well, if you've ruled out the backup-to-harddisk option then this might not
be for you, but it's really simple, so I thought I'd share.
I have a pair of 120GB drives in my system, and a single 250GB drive as
backup (Western Digital with 8MB cache and 3-year warranty, just bought at
thenerds.net for $233US). The backup drive is in an external USB2/Firewire
enclosure, and I connect it once a week (twice if I'm feeling paranoid that
week) to do the backup:
rsync -av --delete --exclude '/mnt/backup/' / /mnt/backup/
So /mnt/backup/ is then an exact copy of /, and the best part is, it's
bootable and functions just like the original drive(s) if I stick it on the
motherboard. And the backup process usually takes just about a half an
hour, depending on how much new data I've added, of course.
-Anthony
http://nodivisions.com/
around, I'm not sure if I wanna spring the
$200 for a pair of 120G+
drives. But we all know I'll regret getting something smaller.
[...]
> Does anyone here have some other clever solutions to getting
>reliable archives of recordings? My ardour sessions, even for demos 
9:46 a.m.
Anthony DiSante <orders(a)nodivisions.com> writes:
I have a pair of 120GB drives in my system, and a
single 250GB drive
as backup (Western Digital with 8MB cache and 3-year warranty, just
bought at thenerds.net for $233US). The backup drive is in an
external USB2/Firewire enclosure, and I connect it once a week (twice
if I'm feeling paranoid that week) to do the backup:
rsync -av --delete --exclude '/mnt/backup/' / /mnt/backup/
So /mnt/backup/ is then an exact copy of /, and the best part is, it's
bootable and functions just like the original drive(s) if I stick it
on the motherboard. And the backup process usually takes just about a
half an hour, depending on how much new data I've added, of course.
Are you sure it's really bootable? Maybe you should try it.
I doubt that the MBR, /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf are correct for a
single-disk configuration. These should be easy to fix as part of the
recovery process, but you're going to need to boot a rescue disk first
and reconfigure for the new hard disk.
This is still a good method. How do you partition the backup disk?
One big filesystem?
--
joq
1:10 p.m.
On Sat, 20 Dec 2003 11:44 pm, Jack O'Quin wrote:
Anthony DiSante <orders(a)nodivisions.com>
writes:
I've always used a pair of removable caddies and have it set up
so I can reboot, put in a fresh unformatted drive, and go all the
way thru a complete partition and rsync of the main drive onto
the backup, and then reboot directly onto the backup drive...
without any intermediate reboots. Using an external firewire
drive I would imagine would also work with even less rebooting.
I put this file in /etc which gets rsync'd to the backup drive
and I use the following bash function (in .bashrc) to fire it off...
# cat /etc/lilo.hdc (which ends up in /mnt/hdc5/etc/lilo.hdc)
boot = /dev/hdc
disk = /dev/hdc
bios = 0x80
delay = 1
install=menu
image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hda5
label = linux
read-only
altlilo ()
{
local BU_MNT=/mnt/hdc5
mount --bind /dev $BU_MNT/dev # for devfs
mount --bind /proc $BU_MNT/proc
chroot $BU_MNT /sbin/lilo -L -C /etc/lilo.hdc
umount $BU_MNT/dev
umount $BU_MNT/proc
return 0
}
This is not exactly audio related but it has to do with using
HDDs for backing up the system as well as the data.
--markc
rsync -av --delete --exclude
'/mnt/backup/' / /mnt/backup/
So /mnt/backup/ is then an exact copy of /, and the best part is, it's
bootable and functions just like the original drive(s) if I stick it
on the motherboard. And the backup process usually takes just about a
half an hour, depending on how much new data I've added, of course.
Are you sure it's really bootable? Maybe you should try it.
I doubt that the MBR, /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf are correct for a
single-disk configuration. These should be easy to fix as part of the
recovery process, but you're going to need to boot a rescue disk first
and reconfigure for the new hard disk.
23 Dec
23 Dec
5:24 a.m.
Jack O'Quin wrote:
Anthony DiSante <orders(a)nodivisions.com>
writes:
Well, ok, I neglected to mention that when I first bought the disk and did
the first rsync, I booted from a slackware CD and ran lilo on the disk one
time. After that, it's bootable.
I have a pair of 120GB drives in my system, and a
single 250GB drive
as backup (Western Digital with 8MB cache and 3-year warranty, just
bought at thenerds.net for $233US). The backup drive is in an
external USB2/Firewire enclosure, and I connect it once a week (twice
if I'm feeling paranoid that week) to do the backup:
rsync -av --delete --exclude '/mnt/backup/' / /mnt/backup/
So /mnt/backup/ is then an exact copy of /, and the best part is, it's
bootable and functions just like the original drive(s) if I stick it
on the motherboard. And the backup process usually takes just about a
half an hour, depending on how much new data I've added, of course.
Are you sure it's really bootable? Maybe you should try it. I doubt that the MBR, /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf
are correct for a
single-disk configuration. These should be easy to fix as part of the
recovery process, but you're going to need to boot a rescue disk first
and reconfigure for the new hard disk.
Yes, I would have to change one mount point in fstab. Fooey on you! But in
terms of OS+data, it's an exact mirror that functions properly, which is
really sweet, especially from a single command.
This is still a good method. How do you partition the
backup disk?
One big filesystem?
Yep, one big one. Standard ext3 except that I tune2fs-ed it, to reduce the
reserved blocks percentage from 5 (the default) to 2, which gains me about 7
gigs (on a "249GB" partition, originally df reported 222GB usable, and after
tune2fs-ing it, there's 229GB usable).
-Anthony
http://nodivisions.com/
3:04 a.m.
On Sat, Dec 20, 2003 at 04:36:14AM -0500, Anthony DiSante wrote:
Kai Vehmanen wrote:
Yep, check out a perl-based app called rsnapshot. You can find it at
freshmeat.net I use it. It works.
--
Jack Bowling
mailto: jbinpg(a)shaw.ca
On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Ross Vandegrift wrote:
Well, if you've ruled out the backup-to-harddisk option then this might not
be for you, but it's really simple, so I thought I'd share.
I have a pair of 120GB drives in my system, and a single 250GB drive as
backup (Western Digital with 8MB cache and 3-year warranty, just bought at
thenerds.net for $233US). The backup drive is in an external USB2/Firewire
enclosure, and I connect it once a week (twice if I'm feeling paranoid that
week) to do the backup:
rsync -av --delete --exclude '/mnt/backup/' / /mnt/backup/ around, I'm not sure if I wanna spring the
$200 for a pair of 120G+
drives. But we all know I'll regret getting something smaller.
[...]
> Does anyone here have some other clever solutions to getting
>reliable archives of recordings? My ardour sessions, even for demos
2 Jan
2 Jan
1:21 p.m.
Ross Vandegrift wrote:
Hey everyone,
I'm currently looking into a computer upgrade, including new
disks. As everyone here knows, more space is well worth it.
Unfortunately, money isn't unlimited ::-(.
i'm using a pair of fast little disks for my daily work as a a striped
pair (meaning your data is history when either drive fails, but you will
also get twice the throughput in best case). backups are made to a slow
but huge ide disk on the same machine, and onto another networked
machine when i'm feeling paranoid.
i recommend this if you have a network. it even protects from the "rm
-rf * ~ OH SHIT!!!" type of hardware failure :-D
Previously, I've always kept my disks in mirrored
pairs to
ensure the death of one disk didn't cost me any data. But looking
around, I'm not sure if I wanna spring the $200 for a pair of 120G+
drives. But we all know I'll regret getting something smaller.
Does anyone here have some other clever solutions to getting
reliable archives of recordings? My ardour sessions, even for demos
quickly outpace what will reasonable fit on to CDs. DVD burners are
still way out of my price range. I'm plum out of ideas.
Thanks for any tips!
--
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- Homer Simpson
Jörn Nettingsmeier
Kurfürstenstr 49, 45138 Essen, Germany
http://spunk.dnsalias.org (my server)
http://www.linuxaudiodev.org (Linux Audio Developers)
7705
days inactive
7720
days old
linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org
12 comments
10 participants
participants (10)
-
Anthony DiSante -
Eric Dantan Rzewnicki -
Frank Barknecht -
Jack Bowling -
Jack O'Quin -
Jan Depner -
Joern Nettingsmeier -
Kai Vehmanen -
Mark Constable -
Ross Vandegrift