[SATLUG] backup recommendations

[Hector Bojorquez]

hmm.. yeah... have to agree  I've seen some pretty immediate recovery with
tapes...

On 3/3/07, Al Castanoli <afcasta at texas.net> wrote:
>
> You have a lot more faith in disk drives than I do.  I do back up to
> disk, but after restoring an entire datacenter from tape after Hurricane
> Andrew over ten years ago, I still back up to tape.  For examble: I'm
> currently backing up around 50GB per night on just one of my servers to
> tape, and intend to continue doing so, even though the machine I'm
> backing up has a failover server that updates every five minutes.  I've
> had occasion to recover data off those tapes four or five times a month
> to show what was on the server at an earlier date.  I'm using a tape
> changer and don't have to worry about overwriting older data when the
> robot has removed a tape from the tape drive.  To get the same
> functionality from disks, I'd have to invest in several more terabytes
> of space for disk drives that rarely approach their MTBF ratings these
> days.
>
> Long story short - backing up to remote disk drives is fast, fairly
> reliable, and much easier than backing up to tape if you're writing your
> own backup scripts rather than using some pointy clicky gui thingy for
> backups, but that doesn't mean backing up to disk is the right solution
> in all cases.
>
> For the Linux servers I have running near the Pacific coast, I use mtx,
> mt, dump, and restore from the command line to do manual tape backups,
> and script those commands into my cron driven backups.  Except for the
> terminal I ssh into those servers with, the servers are firewalled off
> from contacting other machines, and the customer will not allow
> exceptions. so offsite rdist syncing or some other hard drive backup
> routine is not possible.
>
> Al Castanoli
>
> On Fri, 2007-03-02 at 17:05 -0600, Daniel J. Givens wrote:
> > Tapes are unreliable and unnecessarily expensive. An off-site VPN, disk
> to disk
> > backup would be a better solution. Backup the logs, document root,
> configs and
> > databases (if applicable) regularly. Better yet, store your configs in
> an SVN
> > repo and keep that backed up. Only do full system backups occasionally,
> and I
> > would say if you are using stock packages, then just backup your package
> list
> > and leave the distro provided stuff out of the backups all together.
> >
> > What I do for my clients who are limited in funds and storage space is
> backup
> > the critical areas regularly. The standard stuff that comes from the
> distro is
> > going to be able to be recovered with a quick re-install on new
> hardware. So in
> > case of a critical failure, you pop in your install disk to the new
> server,
> > install, update and then restore your configs, websites from SVN and
> databases.
> >
> > The other option is to use LVM with /var and /usr/local as separate
> logical
> > volumes. Back those up as snapshots, then once you have your freshly
> installed
> > system, you copy snapshots back to the newly created LVs on the new
> system.
> >
> > If you have more money to play with and two or more datacenters, go more
> > enterprise. Setup a two backup (file) servers in a failover cluster
> hooked to a
> > SAN. Have this setup at both datacenters with a VPN between the two. Do
> said
> > backups as I described before to both backup servers. You have high
> speed
> > recovery possible should you lose a server in the datacenter, or if you
> lose a
> > whole datacenter. If you lose both, you're screwed.
> >
> > I'm a little hurried in writing this as I'm about to run to the store
> with my
> > wife. If something doesn't make sense or needs more explanation, please
> let me
> > know and I'll address it.
> >
> > Best of luck!
> >
> >
> >
> > Hector Bojorquez wrote:
> > > Thanks so much for all this great information.. .
> > > I am looking at installing an older  tape drive --- Sony AIT SDX-D500c
> > >
> > > I want to be able to backup to a tape nightly.... take the tape off
> site..
> > > etc.
> > > Ideally I would like to be able to do an entire system restore with
> such a
> > > backup.
>
> --
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