Please Critique My Backup Strategy

I have been asked to develop a backup solution for a small office
consisting of one windows xp pc, one windows xp laptop and an ibook.

My solution is as follows:

Set up a server with debian sarge with rysnc and samba. Set up samba to
map the root directories of each of the above computers. At 3pm in the
afternoon run rsync which will backup each of the computer's root
diretcories to a directory on the debian server.

At 3am rsync the debian server's root directory (exluding any samba
shares) to an external hard disk in a usb enclosure. The next day a user
will replace the external hard drive with a fresh one and take the fresh
backup disk home as an off site back up. This procedure is cycled each
day with three external hard disks. There will
always be a disk off site containing a full backup.

Please critique my backup solution. Please point out any flaws you can
see.

Thanks

On 2006-06-01, Luke Tadhg <stopspam@spamtrap.com> wrote:
> I have been asked to develop a backup solution for a small office
> consisting of one windows xp pc, one windows xp laptop and an ibook.

That's not all that well defined a backup specification. What do
you need backed up on those machines: absolutely everything, just
data, data and apps? How large is the data you need to back up?

> Set up a server with debian sarge with rysnc and samba. Set up samba to
> map the root directories of each of the above computers. At 3pm in the
> afternoon run rsync which will backup each of the computer's root
> diretcories to a directory on the debian server.

I don't believe that you need samba. If you put cygwin on the Windows
machines, you can probably use rsync over ssh. You can certainly do
it from the OS X machine.

> At 3am rsync the debian server's root directory (exluding any samba
> shares) to an external hard disk in a usb enclosure. The next day a user
> will replace the external hard drive with a fresh one and take the fresh
> backup disk home as an off site back up. This procedure is cycled each
> day with three external hard disks. There will
> always be a disk off site containing a full backup.

I don't understand why you'd back up the client workstations to the
linux box, but then not back up those files to external disk. I would
only include those files, excluding the rest of the server, except for
maybe /etc and /var. (Presuming you have no important files in /home.)

In addition, I think shuttling hard disks back and forth is somewhat
risky as a backup strategy. They are not really designed to be
transported in this manner, and you risk damaging a drive transporting
them so frequently. It will be more expensive, but tape will be a
much better medium for this purpose. (Even something like an iPod
would serve better in this capacity than a plain old hard disk.)

The place where samba would be applicable would be if you wanted to
serve home directories from the linux machine. But with two laptops
which presumably leave the office from time to time, I'm not sure that's
such a good idea. (I manage it fine myself, but that's because I'm
the primary user of my laptop, and I know when my home directory is
and is not available. Your users may not be so savvy, or may not know
what to do when their home is not available.)

--keith

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