Backups. No one likes doing them, but they’re too important not to do. Typically when I’m doing stuff for my websites, I will occasionally do a tar of a directory and save it off, or even set up a script that will do this nightly. Then I have issues with disks filling up, and not wanting to delete my backups for fear of losing something (like the 20 copies aren’t enough!)
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I’ve been a perl programmer/scripter/hacker for many years now, and I will frequently use CPAN modules to be able to do the out-of-the ordinary. This small guide is intended to help people easily install these modules.
First, let’s get the CPAN module up to date:
$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
(take defaults to set everything up)
cpan> exit
$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan> install Bundle::CPAN
(answer yes to the question about saving data)
cpan> reload cpan
Then, to install a module, it’s simply:
$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan> install <name of module>
cpan> exit
One of the issues I’ve found with having lots of data is the fact that I’m worried that a hard drive will fail, and I’ll lose something important. Since I did have that happen earlier this year, I am now determined to not let it happen again. I’ve been focusing a lot on resiliency – making it so that there are no single points of failure. Since I have been collecting a lot of hard drives, I decided to put them to good use, and set up some data replication onto multiple drives.
You might ask, why not just set up a RAID5? Or, alternatively, why not buy a Drobo and be done with it? I hear the first one a lot, especially since I deal with RAID day in and day out for my day job. The main issue I don’t do either of these things is that I’m cheap! I want to be able to use all of the hardware I have without tossing out old stuff. On my server, I have the following drives:
