In the wake of the recent loss-of-BinRock scare, I've decided to make my backup scheme more robust. I went out and bought a 200 GB hard drive and installed it in my Linux server at home to house the backups, and I'm using a clever script called rsnapshot to do the majority of the work.

Whereas before I was only replicating the database, I'm now going to be backing up pretty much everything important on the server, including everyone's home directories, photos, etc.; about 35 GB worth of data all told. However, because of the clever protocols like rsync (on which rsnapshot is based), I should have no problem maintaining these backups with my little home DSL connection.

The rsync protocol only transfers the files that have changed on the server, and large files like photos change relatively infrequently on BinRock, so there shouldn't be much to download at any given time. Of course, I do have to download the full 35 GB once to start things off, and this initial download will probably take about a week. Just watch: Murphy's Law states that some other disaster must befall BinRock sometime in the next week.

Once this new setup is up and running, at any given time I will have snapshots of BinRock every four hours for the last day, and then daily snapshots going back a week, and then weekly snapshots going back a month, like so:

With this setup, not only will I be protected against a total loss of the server, I'll also have the incremental backups which allow me to restore a user's file if they accidentally delete something important. I'm like a nurturing mother duck sheltering my little ducklings under my wing. Quack quack, little ducklings.