For Backups: External or Internal Drives?

[joncr]

I'm looking for opinions regarding backing up to an internal drive versus an external drive.

I'm currently backing up to an external drive. It isn't silent and the noise annoys me. The fan is always on and it's the loudest thing in the room. I could just as easily use an internal drive.

I see lots of adamant online advice to keep the backups on the external drive. But, that drive is attached to my hardware, it's part of the same file system, plugged into the same UPS, and it is always on. Seems to me that any threat to the internal drives would also be a threat to the external drive a few feet away. So, what do I gain in terms of reliability from the external drive? (All the actual drives are Hitachi Diamondstars.)

My interest in backing up is to recover files I might lose inadvertently, not to do a complete system reinstall from the backup. For that, I use Clonezilla or just reinstall from scratch. I keep copies of precious files on Dropbox and elsewhere.

[DBelton]

Files that absolutely must have...

Back up and store off-site.

For most files, though, it's more a matter of preference. An internal drive might be faster for you to back files up to, but an external could be moved from one computer to another.

I back most of mine up to a NAS drive, which is [i[almost[/b] as fast as using my internal drives, but the drive itself is in a different room of the house.

If your external is a USB 2.0 drive, you take a big performance hit in using an external drive.

[joncr]

Thanks. I'm using the external unit with Firewire at the moment. It's used only for backup so speed isn't really important. It's fed by one rsync script that runs hourly and another that runs daily.

Another consideration is that the machine won't wake from suspend properly with the unit connected and powered on.

The important stuff is on Dropbox. I have access to a good bit of other space elsewhere and the really, really important stuff is duplicated there.

Guess I'm leaning to using internal drives. I have way more drive space than I need; makes sense to use some of it.

[ThomasMcA]

I partition my large, internal drive, then backup to those new partitions. Occasionally I move the oldest backup to an external drive for redundancy.

I'm curious what you rsync hourly vs. daily.

[joncr]

I back up /home every hour and / daily. Might be a bit often, might not be.

Last year I found myself with extra external drives, so I took the drives out and stuffed them in this machine. I left one external unit, which is the one I mentioned above.

F18 wouldn't resume suspend properly with the external drive attached, and it would without it. Plus the fan was annoying. So, like you, I moved the backups to a large internal drive.

And... resume from suspend isn't working, again.

[ThomasMcA]

Interesting ... Never thought of that, but I might do the same.

[joncr]

I'm primarily interested in recovering lost files, including edited configuration files. Most of those are going to live in /home and in /etc.

I'll get around to using Clonezilla to create a reinstallable image on a USB stick. Frankly, I could just about as easily do a new install and get my config files from the backups, if disaster struck.

[DBelton]

I mainly just backup my data on a set schedule. Most things aren't backed up because I can replace them just as easily as restoring a backup, but things I can't easily replace or critical data gets backed up.

My changed configuration files, I manually save a copy whenever I change them. I was using etckeeper for awhile, and it saved changes to /etc in a git repo and tracked them, really nice package but it was overkill for my machines here.

[joncr]

Originally Posted by DBelton

I mainly just backup my data on a set schedule. Most things aren't backed up because I can replace them just as easily as restoring a backup, but things I can't easily replace or critical data gets backed up.

My changed configuration files, I manually save a copy whenever I change them. I was using etckeeper for awhile, and it saved changes to /etc in a git repo and tracked them, really nice package but it was overkill for my machines here.

I've read innumerable howtos about backing up and decided the important thing is just to back up, one way or another. Do even just one manual backup and you're still ahead of the game.

Although manually saving edited config files is, obviously, a good idea that, obviously, I didn't think of.

I also use OS X on a MacBook that does backups with Time Machine to a Time Capsule. That's worked well and silently for several years. And, been very useful on several occasions. (I once zapped a directory created the day before with a couple thousand vacation pix.)