No-brainer backup from Linux to space on remote drive?

[Ralph A. Mack]

On Feb 15, 2012, at 14:25, Alan Johnson wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Ralph A. Mack <ralphmack at comcast.net> wrote:
> If backup (or any act of maintenance) is something I need to remember to do, it will never happen. If it's something I can set up once and then forget about for a few years, that'll work...
> 
> With the other clarifications in this thread, I think you are on the right path for your goals.  However, unless I am missing your hyperbole, you are dooming yourself if you plan to forget about your backups for a few years.  At the very least, you need to check it once in a while to make sure it is still running as expected, no matter what solutions you go with.  

Yeah, I probably didn't say exactly what I meant, just what I wished I could mean. :) The key thing is that I can be reactive at need rather than proactive. Email is a good tool to tell me I'd better take a look. That'll work. Like several years ago when my son was playing by himself in the other room and then things got a little _too_ quiet and I had to go see what he was up to. :) 

Since I'm setting up daily backup and I generally log myself out, I can have my systems tell me the date of the last successful backup when I log in, too. If the backups go down and I haven't logged in since then, I haven't been generating any new data to back up. I can fix them before I start working again and be ok. That's probably the lowest life-impact solution, but it'll take a little more work to set up, so I'll probably go the email route even though it means a bit more daily spew from several systems to glance at and toss out.

One characteristic of all us tech folks, I think - we'll put an amazing amount of effort into all sorts of Rube Goldberg devices to afford us the sheer luxury of being magnificently lazy. :) Here I'm protesting that I won't put a lot of effort into setting up backups but I'm already thinking about what I'd do for a shell script to scrape the logs, determine success or failure, and the flash it up on the screen at login. I think it's a form of madness.....

Thanks,
Ralph

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