What's a good way to backup (and maybe synchronize) your development machine? [closed]

Question

I make extensive use of source control for anything that relates to a project I'm working on (source, docs etc.) and I've never lost anything that way.

However, I have had two or three crashes (spread over the last 4 years) on my development machine that forced me to reinstall my system and reconfigure my apps (eclipse, vim, Firefox, etc.). For weeks after reinstalling, I was missing one little app or another, some PHP or Python module wasn't there, stuff like that.

While this is not fatal, it's very annoying and sucks up time. Because it seemed so rare, I didn't bother about an actual solution, but meanwhile I've developed a mindset where I just don't want stuff like that happening anymore.

So, what are good backup solutions for a development machine? I've read this very similar question, but that guy really wants something different than me.

What I want is to have spare harddrives on the shelf and reduce my recovery time after a crash to something like an hour or less.

Thinking about this, I figured there might also be a way to use the backup mechanism for keeping two or more dev workstations in sync, so I can continue work at a different PC anytime.

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EDIT: I should've mentioned that

• I'm running Linux
• I want incremental backup, so that it's cheap to do it frequently (once or twice a day)

RAID is good, but I'm on a laptop most of the time, no second hd in there, no E-SATA and I'm not sure about RAIDing to a USB drive: would that actually work?

I've seen sysadmins use rsync, has anybody had any experiences with that?

Answer 1

I would set up the machine how you like it and then image it. Then, you can set up rsync(or even SVN) to backup your homedir nightly/etc.

Then when your computer dies, you can reimage, and then redeploy your home dir. The only problem would be upgraded/new software, but the only way to deal completely with that would be to do complete nightly backups of your drive(s).

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Thanks, this sounds like a good suggestion. I think it should be possible to also update the image regularly (to get software updates / installs), but maybe not that often. E. g. I could boot the image in a VM and perform a global package update or something.

Hanno