[mythtv-users] MythTV backup

[Willy Boyd]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 8:57 AM, David Segall <david at segall.net> wrote:
> Yesterday I thought I might have lost all my MythTV data. Fortunately,
>  the fix was simple but it made me wonder how I could protect my set up
>  from catastrophic failure.
>
>  Operating a redundant fall back computer seems like overkill for this
>  application but I don't see any other solution to ensuring that MythTV
>  satisfies the SOAF [1] factor.
>
>  How do you ensure that your fried MythTV can be restored in time for the
>  nightly news and you have not lost the latest episode of the unmissable
>  series that screened last night when you were out?
>
>  --
>  David
>
>  [1] SOAF = Significant Other Acceptance Factor. Clearly, GAF and WAF are
>  sexist so I thought of using PAF for Partner Acceptance Factor but that
>   did not cover the MythTV geeks who are living with their aged parents.
>
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This doesn't really apply to the recordings, but I use an
implementation of the incremental rsync backup strategy that got so
hot a few years ago for my OS partitions.  It's a set of scripts
called "dirvish", easily found via Google.

For the OS of both my Linux boxes, I keep a daily snapshot, going back
2 weeks.  Then weeklies for a month before that (I think).  This is
all done to one file server, over the local network with ssh, onto a
RAID-5 array (there's your disk redundancy).  The nice part is, I
always know in the back of my mind I have a pristine backup less than
24 hours old (and a post-backup script gets run for the mysql dump).
I don't even really think twice these days about doing a distro
upgrade or moving to a new bigger drive... i.e. the kinds of things
that made me nervous before if I didn't have a full backup.  And I'll
know I have at least 2 weeks to catch any problems or get to my old
configuration files.

As for the recordings, like a previous poster said:  It's just TV.  If
I REALLY need something that got deleted, the Internet has my back. :)
 Actually, anything that super special I'll eventually compress to
H.264 and move over to the file server anyway.

- Willy