Public Service Announcement: please do a backup if you haven't in awhile. This weekend we feature articles varying from scary backup stories to how-to safeguard your data with encrypted backup solutions. 

Scary Backup Stories

by Paul Barry

Backups. We all know the importance of making a backup of our most important systems. Unfortunately, some of us also know that realizing the importance of performing backups often is a lesson learned the hard way. Everyone has their scary backup stories. Here are mine.

Reliable, Inexpensive RAID Backup

by Brian C. Lane

As a topic, backups is one of those subject likely to elicit as many answers as people you ask about it. It is as personal a choice as your desktop configuration or your operating system. So in this article I am not even going to attempt to cover all the options. Instead I describe the methods I use for building a reliable, useful backup system. This solution is not the right answer for everyone, but it works well for my situation.

LVM and Removable IDE Drives Backup System

by Mike Fogarty

When the company I work for, a civil engineering and surveying firm, decided to move all its AutoCad drawings onto a central fileserver, we were presented with a backup situation orders of magnitude larger than anything we had confronted before. We had at that time (now considerably larger) about 120,000 files, totaling 200GB, that were in active change and needed to be backed up at least daily.

My first thoughts were of some sort of tape backup system, but as I began to research them, I was shocked at the prices I encountered. A tape autoloader large enough to contain our filesystem ran about $12,000 and a 40Gig tape was $89. When I first convinced my boss to let me run Linux on our servers, cheap was a big selling point. So, what are the alternatives?

Backup and Update

by Shawn Powers

In this video, editor Shawn Powers shows us how to do a basic backup in Linux. Or as he puts it, a public service announcement to please do a backup if you haven't in awhile!