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

[Alan Johnson]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 3:11 PM, Ralph A. Mack <ralphmack at comcast.net>wrote:

> 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. :)
>

haha!  My kids are just getting past that age: they are often quite, but it
still doesn't feel right. =)

>
> 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.
>

I love the on-login idea!  Just add it to your startup applications (on
gnome or unity, but did around in the menus).  A command like `tail -n <#>
<logfile> | gedit` should do the trick.  More reliable than email too, in
this case.


>
> 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.....
>

By that logic, it could be argued that the entirety of computing is just a
series of Rube Goldberg machines. =)  Just look at any source code.  Think
about what it takes to turn even a basic hello-world program into a pattern
photons that hit your eyes just right.  I think it is just the nature of
building off of other people's work.  I like to think of it as standing on
the shoulders of giants.

I once read that a good system administrator is one who automates tedious
tasks before they become tedious.  This implies a perfect amount of lazy. =)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/private/gnhlug-discuss/attachments/20120215/635dd8ca/attachment.html