Tim,

My backup pool is much smaller, but what I do is very similar.

I've got 2 400gb sata disks in a Raid1 array. Daily backups go to these disks where 2 fulls and 5 incremental are saved.

I've also got one removable 400gb disk bay in a 5.25" bay. I use 15 disks and rotate Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and on the forth week insert a monthly disk. I wrote a simple bash script that copies my backuppc mount point onto this removable disk weekly.

When I get in on Monday (assuming I didn't get an email about a failed dump) I do the following:

1. Stop BackupPC
2. Unmount its partition (the partition I took the dump of).
3. Mount the removable disk to /mnt/disk
4. mount -o bind /mnt/disk/Backups-Jan_14_2006/backuppc to /var/lib/backuppc
5. restart BackupPC.

So at this point I've got BackupPC running on the backup disk in the removable disk bay.

I log into BackupPC's web interface and then restore a full backup to an rsync share I have on the backup server, on another disk, and check the data.

When this is complete I can assume the backup can be trusted, and I mark in my log book that this backup was successful.

My weekly disks stay in house in a safe and the monthly disks are moved off site. I'm looking into an off site storage service like AmeriVault for redundancy.

Your process is much like mine, but on a larger scale. I think your best bet to reduce the number of disks being moved around is to use the largest disks you can. I have a few 500gb disks, but the majority are 400gb.

Either way, I'd rather deal with disks than tapes! :)

Justin R. Pessa - BOFH

Brontes Technologies
400 West Cummings Park Suite 2600
Woburn, MA  01801

tel: (781) 756-1700 x248
www: http://www.brontes3d.com
irc: irc.freenode.net | asdf_ on ##freebsd


Tim Chipman wrote:
I'm trying to determine if a particular approach might work for "offsite backup 
copy" of BackupPC data store, more-or-less based on a matched pair of hot-swap SATA 
LVM disk sets.. and specifically I was wondering if anyone else does something thus?

ie: (numbers are for illustration only..)

-assume BackupPC is storing data locally on a raid disk array, call it a 
~500gig pool for illustrative purposes.

-independant of the raid array disks for above data, we have a 4-bay sata 
hot-swap disk set(4x200gb = 600gb in raid 5 LVM) and also a second (spare) set 
of (identical) disks in trays (4x200gb = 600gb in Raid5-lvm)

-once per week, data is copied from ~500gb local pool into the 4-sata disk 
hot-swap volume.  When done, this raid array is taken offline, and the [well 
labelled :-)] disks are pulled and transferred to a secure offsite location.

-spare set of [well labelled :-)] 4-SATA disks in trays come from offsite 
location, insert to backupPC server, mount the raid. We're ready to repeat 
process.


Additionally, I suppose - based on how quick the data pool evolves, rsync could 
be used to update the (rotating disk pool raid5 data) which might be faster 
than doing (reformat and clean copy) each week.  Or maybe not.

Just curious if anyone does something like this; if there are obvious issues or 
the like.

(Clearly it gets a bit cumbersome for a data pool that is too large .. lugging 20 SATA 
disks wouldn't be fun .. but for "reasonable" data pool size it ?seems? like it 
could be feasible?)


Many thanks,


Tim Chipman



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