Don’t just leave your backups alone, check them!

I use a Readynas+ to backup all my Linux using a homegrown incremental Rsync script and my Mac using SuperDuper.  For the last few weeks the space on the little Nas has been getting pretty low.  I just thought that I just had a lot of stuff…  But thinking further, 1.4Tb is a hell of a lot of stuff.  Where on earth was my space going?  A few uses of du -h showed that I had 200Gb of music and film.  My Mac took over 300Gb (3 x rotated SuperDuper sparse images).  My main Linux box took a lot, but suprisingly my Mythtv backup took 0.5Tb.  WTF? I only keep 3 incremental backups (plus an archived one every now and again) of that machines root partition. e.g. 15Gb max!  Then it dawned on me.  With Myth 0.21 new Disc Groups, I added a new 300Gb partition for storage, BUT I never added it to the exclude list for my Rsync backup. So I’d been backing up all my recordings for the last few months. Doh!!

That’s quite a lot to backup on a nightly basis!