Sun, 27 Apr 2014
Personal backups
My main computers nowadays are:
- My personal laptop.
- My work laptop.
- My phone.
Given that, and given my propensity to start large fun home networking related projects but then leave them unfinished, here is my strategy for having reliable backups of my personal laptop:
- Buy an external hard disk, preferably the kind that requires no external power supply.
- Store it at work, and make an encrypted filesystem on it.
- Once per two weeks, take my personal laptop to work, where I will connect the external disk over USB, and do backups to it using e.g. dirvish (which is something like Apple's Time Machine software).
- When the backup finishes, use a post-it note to write today's date on the external disk, then put it back in my work filing box.
This seems to have the following advantages:
- No decrease in privacy -- the data is stored encrypted.
- Convenient off-site storage.
- I don't have to be thoughtful about what I am backing up.
- Since I'll be using dirvish, restoring data will be easy.
If people have any thoughts about this, or do things a different way and have pros or cons to share, I'd love to hear.
I realize this doesn't protect my phone or work laptop. I'll work on those some other time.
