[SATLUG] backup recommendations

[Luis Garza]

Backups are important!  They are needed to maintain historical data.  This
can be of databases, replay log files, log files, emails or any data that
can changed and a historical record needs to be maintained.

As for remote backup stores, they are extremely important but rarely done.
 Many consider the prospect of a complete and total disaster and the need
to rebuild the data center in a remote location with the remote backups as
extremely unlikely.  It is not unusual the IT departments do not plan or
allocate funds for this purpose.  But I can name several disasters that
have occurred requiring the data center to be rebuilt and restore at a
remote location.

Do you remember:
1)  The hurricane that hit Houston and knockout the credit card centers there
2)  Oklahoma city bombing that knockout the federal center.
3)  9/11 that damaged the data centers for many financial data center in
and around the WTC.
4)  New Orleans hurricane and flood.

Imagine all the small and medium sided business that do not have a remote
backup storage and restore plan.

No backup ... No restore ... No business

I wonder how many work for companies that do not have a disaster recovery
plan?

Luis Garza
www.luisgarza.com
luis at luisgarza.com
l.garza at yahoo.com

tom weeks wrote:
> On Saturday 03 March 2007 15:32, Daniel J. Givens wrote:
>> I'm not saying tape backup is old and dying. Tape is good when you need
>> to
>> keep long term archives or you do not have the bandwidth/infrastructure
>> to
>> do remote backups, but still want some backups stored off site.
>
>
>> As a whole
>> though, I do not trust tapes as much as I trust redundant disks.
>
> You make it sound like RAID is a replacement for backups..
> Not hardly!
>
> RAID addresses HARDWARE AVAILABILITY issues (in this context)..
> Backups address DATA RETENTION issues.
>
> A user, admin or hacker deletes a bunch of files.. or you experience
> filesystem corruption.. RAID is not going to do SQUAT for you.  Only
> Backups
> will save your cookies.
>
> Most people shooting for a high availability system will go for some form
> of
> RAID.  But any system where the data ITSELF is important, Backups are the
> key.
>
> There are some interesting Hybrid "occasional mirror" type backup
> solutions..
> that combines the instant disk to disk, mirror functionality of RAID, but
> only does this image once/week or the like.  This is an interesting way of
> doing it.. but also has it's own sets of pros and cons.
>
> I personally like the idea of combining local disk to disk image/snapshot
> type
> of solution with then disk to tape backups from the static disk.  This
> gives
> you local fast "backup file access".. with the pros of off site tape
> storage.
>
> Tweeks
> --
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