This evening marks another landmark in my home computer network setup – I’ve dug out my old tape drives, and am running a backup right now in fact. Been .. hmm, well, we moved to Ewing in October of 2003, so I guess that was my last backup. Never unpacked and hooked up the drives there, ’cause I didn’t have the room. So this evening I crawled behind the desk, again, and hooked up the cables to get the old DLT2000 plugged in. Grabbed one of my tapes and started a backup. Now I have to figure out a backup schedule, since there’s not nearly as much on the home computer anymore to worry about backing it up nightly. Though I could do other funny things, like running monthly and incremental dumps from the laptop over the network, but I’ll worry about that once I figure out what I’m doing with the desktop (Ideally I could backup the laptop to the desktop’s drive, but I don’t know that I have the room on – or faith in – this drive.) Also dug out and plugged in the DDS drive, but I need to tear that one apart like I did the DLT and get the dust out of it. Also hope to leave the drives off when I don’t need them, unlike before when they were on all the time and constantly sucking dust through. Which might explain the strange noises from the DLT right now, but I hope not since I think I got all the dust out of it. And finally I hope to bring home a couple other tape drives that were slated for trash, one of which is a DLT autoloader that holds 5 tapes at once. In theory, I can write a nice live-ish backup script that can shuffle tapes around as needed, and do everything on there.
Oh, and insight to my humor if you don’t know it already – the title of this post? Old BBS tagline. The name of my overkill backup script? /usr/local/sbin/reverse.sh