[rdiff-backup-users] backup incrementals to optical media?

[Brandon Saxe]

I was just thinking that my current backup solution is
not good enough. I have a USB hard drive attached to
an NFS server where I save rdiff-backups. The hard
drive is 500GB and I'm using about 350GB currently.
The problem is this....

the rdiff-backup represents not only a current
'mirror' (I backup daily) of my data, but also true
'backups' through the incremental storage facility.

The problem is this: If I lose my USB hard drive, then
I lose all my backups. Now, I know that a real backup
scheme requires one to have two copies of the backups,
but that kind of defeats the purpose of using an
efficient tool like rdiff-backup. I don't want to copy
all the data to a second drive and I don't want to run
RAID1 mirror either.

Assuming the USB hard drive goes bad, I still have a
backup of the 'mirror'. Essentially, the live systems
are a backup in and of themselves. I would just
rdiff-backup again to get that back. The problem I see
is that the incrementals and all the rdiff-backup-data
would be lost. This is where everything is lost.

Would it make sense to make a backup copy to optical
or tape media of all the data in the rdiff-backup-data
directories? Would I be able to use these increments
if the USB drive failed? Would these files still be
able to be used if files needed to be recovered?

Will this work or do I have to have a mirror/copy of
the whole disk to prevent from complete failure?



Thanks.
  Brandon