Lucky Backup questions

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1

openSUSE 12.3
KDE 4.10.5
Lucky Backup 0.4.7

I use Lucky Backup(LB) and it was successful in restoring some of my files after my hard disk crashed.

So, I am about to get back into the normal routine of daily backup and it occurred to me that maybe I would need to provide a different destination medium.

Has anyone had this happen ? Hard drive crashes, gets rebuilt, and off we go. If I use the same destination medium the new system (might as well be a different PC), will be compared to the old. And there will be a lot of differences.
As I talk out loud while typing this text, I am thinking I have to either:

  1. Provide a different destination medium or
  2. Modify the LB script to point to a different destination file structure. <-----I think this

The original LB destination script says this:

/var/run/media/hexdump/USB-HDD/

I think I need to change it to something different so that if I need to do a restore at some point after today, I will need to pick the 2nd version.

/var/run/media/hexdump-2/USB-HDD/

Sort of a “Before Crash” and “After Crash”

And hopefully I won’t need to worry about Crash-1, Crash-2, etc.
I think I might shoot myself.

2

On Wed, 23 Oct 2013 18:16:02 +0000, hextejas wrote:

> Has anyone had this happen ? Hard drive crashes, gets rebuilt, and off
> we go. If I use the same destination medium the new system (might as
> well be a different PC), will be compared to the old. And there will be
> a lot of differences.

I worked in IT for 15 years, and in that line of work, you are fortunate
if you never have to deal with restoring data due to a system failure or
hard drive crash.

Suffice to say, yes, I’ve had to rebuild systems from scratch for various
reasons and restore data from backup.

Backing up to the same medium the data is stored on isn’t really a
disaster recovery plan. Sure, you can recover a deleted file (but there
are other ways to do that, too), but if the drive crashes, you lose the
original and the backup.

Myself, on my home systems, I schedule cron jobs to rsync data to a
backup drive. I actually have two external drives that are used for
nothing but backups (a 2 TB drive that my desktop and critical laptop
data is backed up to, and a 4 TB drive that I just got that is now a
second tier backup for the 2 TB drive, which is a few years old now).

Stuff that I’m likely to accidentally overwrite goes in Dropbox. For
example, I am self-employed, so I generate invoices. Each client’s
invoice is based on the previous invoice for the client, and sometimes I
goof and save it with the old name rather than the new after I’ve edited
it. Dropbox lets me recover the older version.

For stuff that I put on dropbox that I consider confidential, the
directory is encrypted with encfs before it is synchronized, so only the
encrypted data is synchronized. That takes a little more work to set up,
but it works very nicely.

Jim

–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

3

I have used Lucky Backup for a few years now, mostly to backup my home partition, I have made a few saves with it. I recently lost a months data, I was going to clean up my partitions, so I made a backup of everything and a clone to my external HD. Guess what, external HD would no longer connect to any computer after the back up, I even gutted the HD out of the case and the controller was bad I assume, luckily a months worth of missing files did not kill me, since I email most of my documents, and backup accounting files to a thumb drive.

I also use clonezilla for easy restorable images, that are great when you screw up /root.

4

Jim:
Thanks for turning me onto encfs. I’ve been wondering if this type of solution was available but had not yet looked for one.
Does that directory auto mount at startup?

Thanks, Jon

5

I might have misled you Jim in that I don’t keep the backup on the same medium as the live data. I backup to an external HDD.
My question had more to do with needing to change the LB parameter so as to be able to back up to a new data set on the external HDD.
I have determined that I need to do it and have done so.
It would be like changing to a new backup tape. Before crash and after crash.
It’s amazing to me how the clarity comes when I put thoughts on paper.

6

I had the same thing happen to the external drive containing the only backup of my wife’s failed HDD back in 2006. Since then I’ve backed up to one 2.5" usb drive, and then again to a second identical drive. When I outgrew the two 500Gb drives I was using I started over with a pair of 1.5Gb. The drives are cheap in comparison to the risk of losing years of files.

When I travel, as I often do, I take one drive with me to backup on the road. The second stays safe at home. That way, if the travelling drive is lost or stolen or dropped or… I still have a backup of all but the newest files at home.

+1

7

For local backups (i.e. also in a LAN) I use luckybackup a lot. Like Jim, I’ve met the occasions where everything had to be rebuilt from scratch (in one occasion both Windows2000 and an openSUSE 10.3 servers got lost in a fire, good things was this was in a weekend, where the last backups were from friday afternoon. A replacement openSUSE server was up in three hours (install, configure, restore homedirs and shares), ran into all kinds of trouble re. the Windows server. then moved the windows stuff to samba first -three more hours- and in the end never replaced the windows server).

I used to use Dropbox too, but have now moved to my own ownCloud instance. Until a month ago I rented a VPS for that, but now I co-use a spare server in a datacenter where we have 10 TB of storage, 4 quad-core Xeons and 128 GB of RAM available :D.

8

I have 2 external HDs as well, that is why I only lost a months data, so I was ready to swap the backup drive in a couple of days, I keep one in the house, and one in a detached building on my property, never know, a fire could take years of data. I swap the indoor and outdoor drives once a month.

If I lose a months worth of data, it is not the end of the world.

9

An excellent practice, and one I’ve used too. I can’t tell you how many of my old customers used to proudly boast that they kept a separate backup drive and then I’d see the drive sitting next to the PC. Not only would a fire take them both, but so would a thief.

10

That’s nothing…Had a customer that swore that she had a backup on tape. Looking at the tape it was unreadable. Seems she used the same tape every day for several years and religiously wrote the data but never did a check… Another customer in the days of floppies would do her work take the floppy out put it in a drawer and the next day her data was gone. Upon a visit it wa observed that said drawer was covered in magnetic junk. So every day she wiped the disk buy putting it in a metallic drawer covered by a ton of magnets…

Oh well rotfl!

11

My favorite backup story is from about ten years ago. A customer in Boston
called and asked if I could help his friend’s company. Their IT guy was on
vacation. I arrived to find a very large office in complete chaos. It seems
that an employee had been fired the day before, and before she left she’d wiped
all traces of the accounts receivable file from the server. When I asked where
the backup was I was greeted by blank stares. It seemed nobody had ever been
shown how to backup the server, so it had simply never been done.

“No problem” I said. “Nobody’s done any work yet today, so there must be
traces of the old file on the server.” It was then that I heard the terrifying
words "We don’t have any paper records either. That file was the only record we
had of roughly six million dollars worth of accounts receivable that haven’t
been invoiced yet. if we lose that file we will have lost $6,000,000.

An hour later I was sitting alone in the server room with my head in my hands
trying to figure out how to tell the customer that his file was gone. The
disgruntled employee had known what she was doing and had written over the file with
garbage. As I was trying to figure out how to deliver the bad news I heard a
voice behind me say “Dave, could I show you something on the PC on my desk.”

I replied “Not now, I don’t have time to fix a PC today.”

The voice just quietly said “No, you don’t understand. I think you really want to see this.”

I turned to see an eighteen year old mail boy walking away wearing torn shorts,
a hoody sweatshirt and sneakers. I followed him, and before I even reached his
desk I spotted the name of a file sitting right in the middle of the desktop on
his PC. You guessed it. It was the missing file. The office was back up and running
half an hour later, and not a single record was missing.

When I asked the young man what was going on he simply said. “I knew that lady
had been fired, and I saw her acting real funny yesterday. I figured she was up
to no good so I made a copy of the file that she used to work on all the time.”

Postscript: I got a new customer, the young fellow got a $45,000 reward and a
promotion, and a couple of months later that mail boy became the new office
manager.

12

On 2013-10-25 03:46, caprus wrote:
>
> My favorite backup story is from about ten years ago. A customer in
> Boston

…

> Postscript: I got a new customer, the young fellow got a $45,000 reward and a
> promotion, and a couple of months later that mail boy became the new office
> manager.

That’s a good one, thanks. :slight_smile:

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))