Re: Recommendation sought how to maintain off-site backups/mirrors

On 7/18/26 6:49 AM, Paul Fox wrote:
> martin f krafft via BackupPC-users wrote:
>   > Folks,
>   >
>   > I nearly lost my BackupPC machine the other day and it made me realise
>   > that I have no backups of my backups.
>   >
>   > Hence, I would like to set up a mirroring of the BackupPC (v4) pool to a
>   > remote store, client-side encrypted.
>   >
> 
> I solve this differently, though it does have manual steps.
> 
> The backup pool is on a mirrored raid pair.  Periodically I remove
> half of the pair, label it and store it, and replace it with an older
> disk.  I have 3 such "offsite" disks outside the house at any one
> time.
> 
> The server doesn't need to be powered down for this to work -- SATA is
> a hot-pluggable interface.  I have a script which stops backuppc,
> unmounts the pool, forcibly stops the raid pair, and shuts down the
> interface.  I swap the disk (my server has a removeable drive bay),
> and run another script to start it all up again.  It takes longer to
> relabel the disks than to perform the replacement.  (The raid
> reconstruction on the fresh disk takes several hours, of course.)
> 
> Oh -- and the removeable offsite disks are encrypted, so safe to store
> in relatively insecure places.
> 
> paul
> =----------------------
> paul fox, [email protected] (arlington, ma, where it's 76.9 degrees)
> I have a different method as well.  I wrote two bash scripts that run daily.  The first one runs archive against each of the hosts getting backed up.  I end up with 10 tar.gz files, one for each host.

The second scripts runs after the archive script completes.  That script copies the archive files to a remote server.

I don't back up the entirety of any of the hosts, just the files I would need to recreate each host after installing the OS on a new machine.  So the archives for 10 hosts takes up less that 600 GB.  It takes about two hours to run the archive for all hosts and about 3.5 hours to copy the files to the remote server.

All automated via crontab.  Cron sends me an email twice a day, with info on the archive and transfer processes.

Emmett


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