backup

The data axiom is “always have at least two copies of anything you want to keep!”

Now that I’ve ripped my entire (well, almost entire) CD collection, I have to back it up. A RAID 1 drive is good protection from drive failures, but it doesn’t protect at all for accidental erasure, file corruption, etc. I’m going old school and bought a new 3TB disc, the same size as my RAID, and plugged it into a hard disc enclosure, the same model I have for my another backup drive; I only need to have the same wall-wart and USB cable handy. I formatted the disk with ext4, the same as the source drive, which prevents file-naming errors during backup. However, if you format your disk for use with Windows, you’ll need to install exfat-utils and exfat-fuse in Ubuntu. (I also recommend doing the initial format on a Windows machine.)

I am using Grsync software to make the backup, which is a graphical front-end for the rsync utility. I marked the –update and –delete options, as I want to make an identical copy of the source on the destination: copy what’s not there, replace (based on checksum) what’s changed and delete what was removed from the source. You can perform a dry-run first; be sure to empty the trash and skip the lost+found folder before you sync (the latter may give errors). Viola, backing up FTW!

When deciding on a backup method, it’s important to always remember what you’re backing up and why you’re backing it up – and what risk you can afford.

In this case, these are music files, most of which I have a CD copy of but would never want to put in the months of work in to rip again. The rest are downloads, paid or otherwise, some I may never have access to again. Now, I could probably use something different method (cloud, internal disk), something automated, something better, but this method works for me because I can assume the risk.

I have an initial backup (which I have tested) and a proven backup method, so it’s up to me to keep up the work.