[SATLUG] Backup Recommendations

[Phil Carinhas]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 11:13:39PM -0500, Travis H. wrote:
> > The concept is great and the price is great but after further reading
> > and Googling I am changing my rating of the Buffalo TeraStation,
> > LinkStation and KuroBox offerings for SMB shops from "take a look -
> > might be of interest" to "ignore - not ready for prime time".
> > Based on the emails I have read in this exchange, I would recommend
> > the traditional NFS server approach for your shop for now.
> 
> Yeah I bought 3 of the new SATA 3Gbps 500GB 16MB 7200 rpm drives from
> Hitachi, and a new Silicon Image SATA 3Gbps controller, and I'm going
> to do RAID 5 in software... I hope that will be okay as it is a SMP
> box.  Total cost?  About $1200.

 Travis, 
 
I'm sure it will be fast enough, but you get more speed out of 
raid 5 with more disks.  Also, you don't have any hot-spares in your setup.
I find that important for us.

 For about the same cost, I bought a Supermicro 5-bay sata enclosure,
5 Sata 200gb seagates, and the LSI 150-6 Sata controller (pure hardware
raid). I setup 2 mirrors with a global hot-spare drive. The enclosure
requires 3x5.25" bays, and the fan is noisy, so i replaced it.

 The LSI controller is very nice, and has very easy graphical/curses
type of setup tool that can be accessed while the system is running
Linux. I would have gotten the 3ware controller, but that was $150
more expensive for the 8-port. I find the LSI very decent.


> I've been playing with shfs lately, that's pretty cool as you only
> need the ssh port open on the file server... and you probably already
> have ssh installed for maintenance purposes.  So basically it's
> network file system at no security cost.  May be slow though.

  I would highly recommend Backuppc at backuppc.sf.net. It allows
secure backups through a non-privileged user (needs sudo for rsync)
for unix hosts, and has similar ability for SMB hosts. It has a WEB
interface that allows for restores as well, very efficient on storage
as it will only store unique files accross machines (md5sums) and
compresses the images. It also does a good job with file perms and
stores all that info in separate files.
  

 -Phil
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 | Philip A. Carinhas      | http://fortuitous.com        | 
 | Fortuitous Technologies | Linux Consulting & Training  | 
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