jmoiron.net

It was sorta forecasted for a while, and looking back on it I remember now getting I/O errors on sections of the arlongpark wiki but rebooting it and seeing them go away. The hard drive on my server crashed this past week as wt was playing with postfix. The only noticeable dataloss, after over 24 hours of recovery, were comments to my posts in the last 6 months. Even my apache logs were saved, although I'll have to make sure I get the statistics engine working from the cache as it took 22 hours the first time I ran them in October.

I've got rough ideas for an improved backup system bouncing around in my head; but thus far it has not escaped the confines of my skull and found its way towards a life in code. I want to back up user home directories, databases, /etc (although I'm thinking about perhaps backing up only select pieces of /etc), the apache web root, my trac installations and my svn root, and a list of installed packages. These will be synched thrice a week, with weekly biweekly tarballs saved (in case someone wants to revert from a backup, the sync would not have overwritten their data, since it will be a lossy sync).

I want some easy way for a user to stop the backup system from bothering with their data; perhaps something like apache directive files. This is important for privacy as well, although right now there is no one on my server besides friends of mine I trust.