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Howdy, |
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Long story short that leads up to my questions, I paid off some debt. |
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Finally I'm getting around to doing some things I been wanting to do. |
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One of them, backups. I bought a hard drive enclosure that has a fan to |
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keep things cool. Figured I would get a decent one that hopefully will |
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keep my drives working. My relevant setup. |
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I started with a 3TB hard drive for my /home directory, one partition, |
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years ago. I stuck LVM on it so that I could add to or move things |
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around a bit with some ease. Once that was starting to fill up, I |
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bought a second 3TB drive and added it to the LVM volume. So, in |
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effect, I have a 6TB drive with 3.6TB of data on it at the moment. The |
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biggest user of that space is videos. |
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I just bought two external drive enclosures. One is sort of a spare but |
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I do plan to do some backups on it, mostly pictures from my camera. In |
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one of the enclosures I put a single 6TB drive that I found on ebay. It |
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has about 7,000 hours on it so it should have some life left yet and it |
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passed the smartctl tests. It is USB but it transfers fast. Now to |
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some questions. I use rsync. Command looks something like rsync -auv |
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/source/ /destination/. If I backup the config files in my home |
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directory, should I also include the --delete option? If after a |
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upgrade for example a config file is deleted, because it is no longer |
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needed, or renamed, should the old file be removed or is there a reason |
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to keep them on the backups? Adding the --delete option isn't a problem |
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command wise BUT I wonder if it can cause a problem at some point. |
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Thoughts on that. I plan to use the --delete option for videos since if |
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I deleted one, it is likely broken or something. Biggest question is |
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about config files. |
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On the second enclosure I currently have a 160GB drive. It's big enough |
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for my camera pictures. I would like to backup up my pics to it and |
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then put the drive somewhere besides in the house. I have a couple |
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external buildings that would be safe as far as rain etc but they are |
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not cooled, even tho it gets close to 100F and humid, real humid, here. |
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My question is this. Is it safe to store a drive in that sort of |
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environment? I could see the building getting close to outside temps |
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during the day. I do put a heater in it to prevent freezing during the |
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winter. I usually set the heat to 40F. I'm hoping someone has some |
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real world experience on storing in this sort of environment and not |
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just a text book theory. One reason I want to put them elsewhere, house |
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fire. Even a huge power strike could cause problems if plugged in. We |
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do get lightening strikes here. Maybe not as many as some but our fair |
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share. The 6TB and 3TB drive may join this one as well. |
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I have a 3TB drive on the way, got a good deal on it. I plan to remove |
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the 160GB and put the 3TB drive in the enclosure when it gets here. |
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Later, I will get another enclosure for the 160GB drive. In the end, I |
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will have 6TB, 3TB and a 160GB external drive. Main backups on the 6TB, |
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possible second backup on 3TB of some important files and camera pics on |
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the 160GB. |
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Anyone have some real world experience on these sorts of questions? |
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Thanks. |
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Dale |
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:-) :-) |
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