My Perfect Backup Setup

Productivity Sauce

For a long time I relied on an external hard drive and Jungle Disk as my daily backup solution. This wasn't the most advanced backup setup, but it did the trick. Recently, however, I added a new device to my local network: a tiny Linux-based server with the silly name Bubba Two. Initially, I planned to use it for hosting my private wiki and testing LAMPP-based applications. But since Bubba Two can be used as a file, print, and streaming server, it made sense to put its functionality to some practical use, and use the server as a central storage for all my documents and files. There was only one problem with this: because Bubba Two is based on a PowerPC processor and Jungle Disk doesn't offer a version of their backup client software for this architecture, I could no longer use Jungle Disk as a backup solution. No problem; I have always been curious about the rsync.net backup service which boasts professional technical assistance and support for the rsync over ssh backup, and now I had a perfect excuse to test the service. rsync.net is pricey compared to the Jungle Disk/Amazon S3 combo, but so far, I feel my money is well-spent.

So after spending a couple of evenings moving files and fine-tuning my backup scripts, I'd like to share with you my current backup setup. The key component of my solution is the Bubba Two server (1) where I store all my files, documents, downloads, and a few loose music files. The server uses cron to run a simple Bash script that backs up the data to rsync.net (2) using rsync over ssh as described in this post. To be on the safe side, Bubba Two backs up the data to the attached external USB hard disk (3). Finally, I mount Bubba Two's file system on my production laptop (4) using sshfs, so I can work with files and documents as they were on my laptop.

So that's my backup solution. Care to tell me about yours?

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