Discuss digest, Vol 1 #647 - 12 msgs

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

I wrote:
> Popping in a tape once a night for a week means you can back up about 80
> gigs while you sleep.

Er, more like 225 gigs.  Oops...  But I've only got a bit over 80.

Am posting because the discussion over this flogged mostly-dead horse had one
other argument that I wanted to respond to.  Can't find the citation now but,
paraphrased, the argument was that during recovery from loss of the root
filesystem, the person would likely install from a new distro--and therefore
it wouldn't be practical to restore configs in place, since it would be more
prudent to examine the distro's vanilla versions of the configs and modify
those rather than attempting to restore directly.  (I can think of a case in
point:  sendmail.cf often breaks when running a new version of sendmail.)

I can see the decision in a crash-recovery on whether to move to a new distro
is influenced mainly by two factors:  (1) how long it's been since your last
installation, and (2) how much of a pain in the butt it would be to reinstall
from your old distro and then do the tape restore.

If it's been only a couple months since you installed, your hard drive just
croaked, and you've got a recent tape backup, then the decision's pretty
simple.  Boot off a floppy, install your backup-recovery software, and issue
the restore command.

If (as in my case currently) it's been 3 years since you set up your last
distro, then of course you'd go out and get a snazzy new distro.  When I've
done that in the past, I've loaded my old system into a subdirectory (either
by plugging in the old hard drive, restoring it from tape, or mounting it
across the LAN) and picked through my old configs.  One suggestion:  use RCS
(mkdir RCS ; ci -l greatnewtoy.conf ; vi greatnewtoy.conf ; ci -u
greatnewtoy.conf) for all your edits of distro files.  Then the command 'find
/ -name RCS -print' is your friend when you're trying to make everything work
the way it used to.

My argument is simply that tape is too cheap to fool around with most of the
issues (particularly space efficiency) raised in this debate so far.  And I'm
sure many of you reading this don't have a recent full backup of your Linux
box.  Contemplate that, and hear me on my soapbox asking you how much time and
money it would take to download Amanda, figure it out, buy an adequate tape
drive, and forget the problem from now until whenever you've accumulated so
much stuff that the tapes no longer hold enough...

-rich