ДАВАЙ-ДАВАЙ

Follow up on my previous paperless articles 1 and 2.

If you start scanning every paper you get and then shred it, you need to have a good backup. Here is what I have been using in the last months :

• rdiff-backup started by a cron job. The enclosing shell script test if I’m at home, and exit silently if not.
• Nightly rsync/ssh to a NSLU2 located in a friend’s place. The rsync option “–bwlimit=XX” is very appropriate to avoid overlading my uplink.

To test if my laptop is on my home network, I use this code. It look for the MAC address of my my home router in he ARP table of my laptop.

HOMEDEFGW="0:1b:11:xx:yy:zz"
defgw=`netstat -rn | grep ^default | awk '{print $2}'`
defgwmac=`arp $defgw | awk '{print $4}'`
echo "defgwmac : $defgwmac"
if [ $defgwmac = $HOMEDEFGW ]; then
    ... run rdiff-backup
fi

I do backup everything over the remote site, not only my paperless scans. I like the idea to have my thousands of pictures in a safe place.