Backup volumes

I have a simple system for my removable backup volumes which turns out to have a small flaw. I keep one volume attached to a computer, thus easily accessed, one in the fire safe, and one off-site at work. Once I backup to one I plug the others in (modulo some commuting) and update them too.

There is always a volume in the fire safe and a volume off-site. This means that there is a time when a volume is not attached to a computer because it is traveling to be exchanged with the previous off-site one. Those hours with multiple volumes off-site are the small flaw in the system.

Though, if I added another, fourth, removable backup volume then that could require even more rsyncing to keep them all up to date with the latest. (Being up to date does include retaining older backups.) Perhaps that copying would not be necessary, I haven't thought it through. It would also give the system more redundancy: I could fall back to my current system when a volume failed.

I also have not yet figured out how best to offer the attached-to-a-computer volume's contents to the other computers around the house, I use scp instead. The problem is that the user IDs do not match across systems and I recall that OpenBSD's base nfsd is not the most featureful. Samba might make the ID-mapping easier. I investigated a little and perhaps made notes but, well, it's on the to-do list. Ahead of it is upgrading the OpenBSD machines to 6.1 now that I have given others time to detect and fix its initial issues.

Cheesy fries with gravy

I mentioned craving chips (in the British sense) with sliced melted Cheddar (again, in the British sense) atop them, perhaps with some beef gravy in which to dip them. I made some today and the children and I found them to be a pleasant experience. We happened to have some good local steak and pork sausages that went with the instant onion gravy. Of course, for calorie counting I had to separate my oven chips and my own cheese for grilling so that I could measure the weight of each. For taking the cheese from the block I used my Rollschnitt hand-held slicer which works nicely.