How do you backup your data?

Snood snood at comcast.net
Sat Mar 27 08:45:25 EDT 2010


. wrote:
> How do you protect your GC data files?
> 
> Do you make a backup daily?

Your policies as to how often and in what manner you perform data 
backups should be determined by how important the data is to you, how 
often the data changes, how well you can afford to duplicate data entry 
efforts, and what kinds of resources you have available to you for 
performing the backup.

You should probably stipulate your operating system (GnuCash is used on 
a number of them, I think.), your general use pattern for GnuCash 
(business, home, etc.), and what other types and quantities of data you 
might wish to include in your backup schedule. You'll also probably want 
to remember that GnuCash (at least in Linux) stores custom reports and 
such in a different location than the main data location.

For instance, I use GnuCash only for personal finances. (So I'm no 
expert on it. And if you're asking specifically about the need to 
protect things like the temporary files GnuCash produces, then you might 
not want to read the rest of this message which is about backup 
strategies in general.) But I'm a system admin for a moderate-sized 
production domain (a few dozen servers, and several hundred client 
systems running a mix of various Windows versions, Linux, Unix, and 
Macintosh OS X spread out across the U.S.), so I know a little about 
backing data up from widely diverse sources.

For my personal systems I use a notebook the data on which is 
synchronized several times a day with an external (USB-mounted) drive, 
and at least twice per day with a second notebook which is configured 
identically. (If the primary notebook goes up in smoke, I can pick up 
the second notebook and continue working.) I also burn all of the data 
on the notebooks to DVD-R once per week (or more often if very important 
data has been added. The files in the data source and the the files on 
the DVD-R discs are compared (sha1 hash) to be sure that the data that 
was written is exactly the same as the source data.

I run Debian GNU Linux on the notebooks. I use a package called Unison 
for performing the inter-system and external drive synchronizations. 
That particular package is available, also, for Windows and Macintosh 
systems, so it might work for you regardless of your OS choice.

Depending upon how much data you have, what type of network / internet 
connection you have, and what types of drives you have available to you, 
you can pretty much roll your own solution. You can even store a fair 
amount of data on the Internet if you have an account with any number of 
sites. (Many of them are free.) The main thing that I recommend is to 
avoid proprietary data backup procedures that result in a large single 
file or group of files that can only be read by the backup software you 
used. Try to make the backup process as transparent as possible. It can 
be annoying (to say the least) to find out that you've lost all of your 
data because the single backup file you're depending upon became 
corrupted (or was never written correctly in the first place). This 
happens more often than any of the makers of proprietary solutions would 
like to admit. If you use such a backup solution, the only way to be 
sure of it is to re-extract the data from the archive and compare the 
extracted data to the source data. This will just about double the 
amount of time required for backup procedures.

Sorry I wrote a book.


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