Got Backup?

If you are the type of business person or home techer and are looking for a backup solution on the cheap there are alternatives. If you have multiple machines you could do one of the oldest Linux tricks in the book — NFS + Tar. Just do the mount and tarball all the dirs you need over to the other machine. A step up would be something like Backula. It provides finer control and automation. All excellent ways to do things. But what if your need is ‘on the fly’ and need to do it over the network?

Thats a different wicket altogether. The first obvious approach is of course to implement software RAID-1. Oh hell but we said — over the network — didn’t we? Kills that idea. Or does it? Thankfully no. The lovely folks over at ChironFS have a network solution to solve that very problem. Fact their solution spoofs RAID-1 like functionality at the Filesystem level.

So what does that mean to you? A dynamic always backuped copy of your OS with nearly no intervention other than initial setup. You can run a RAID-1 like setup over the network and know your data is secure. Use sshfs and you could tunnel this to Amazon AWS. Get really sophisicated and you could have your applications survivable to the point in a disaster you bring them up on AWS till repairs are made. But that is beyond the scope of this posting.

Any downsides? Minor. If your prime server/workstation starts pooping false data to disk that too will be replicated. So in a sense ChironFS does not negate an occasional off-disk image capture. ChironFS is essentially two writes of the data so it will never be as fast as native disk. Goes double if you are doing it over the internet. But it is not abysmal performance.

Bottom line is we Linux users have no excuses for having good backup regimens. We have the tools and you can get as sophisticated as you want without undue cost. Even with AWS if all you did was your /home /sbin /var folders you would probably get by with less than $10/mo in usage fees. That’s cheap insurance that any TightWader can appreciate.

ChironFS homepage.
ChironFS tutorial.