As I promised last time, here is a description of how I deal with backups at home.
I am a very safe person when working with computers. Well not just for that… I am a safe person in general. Anyway, when it comes to safeguard the data stored in the home computers, I become even more cautious, up to the point of storing several backup copies of the same data, in case a copy is lost. All in all, I keep up to 4 copies of my data all around the house and one more up in the Internet cloud.
Here is how it works:
- each computer in the network makes its own backup on a storage repository on the Linux server, which is used for that, to handle a local family WEB site, and to handle Internet access via a proxy server; this is what I call the first level of backup.
- each month, I manually transfer the backup copies on the Linux server to a pool of removable drives; this is what I call the second level of backup.
- each month, the previous content of the pool of removable drives is stored on a separate partition of the other server I have in the network, which acts as a storage and printer server; and this is, as you may guess, my third level of backup.
- each month, the previous content of the storage server is moved on to DVD, my forth level of backup.
- periodically, every time I deem it necessary, I finally store a copy of the most important data on the cloud, for safe keeping if something should go badly wrong in the house (I hope that never happens). This is usually data coming from the first level of backup. This data, are never removed form the cloud. Instead, every time I add something, I put the date in the name itself of the backup file, so that an historical archive is safely stored off site.
You can see how each level of backup stores a older version of data than the previous one. This way, files that are deleted from a computer can always be retrieved from an old backup, even though the most recent backups don’t have them anymore. You may call this one too an historical repository, if you are there for the big words.
And finally, here is a picture that delineates, hopefully better than words, what I just described.
To the next…
