On Tue, Jul 25, 2000 at 11:30:29PM -0600, Steve Browne wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Jul 2000 02:48:58 +0100, you wrote:
>
> >What I had in mind was (1) a Linux only solution and (2) using a tape as
> >the backup device. The reason is that many of my company's customers
> >(rural telephone cooperatives) would like to become ISPs and my
> >supervisor wanted me to come up with a Linux solution; besides, I have
> >only one hard drive at home :-). Thanks.
>
> I personally think that tape is an outdated solution. I equipped my
> tower case with "mobile" drive docks, so I can pop HDDs in and out at
> will. I back up Mandrake with a Win98 "rescue" floppy (MSDOS 7.0) then
> switching to a Ghost floppy. The neat thing about Ghost is that it
> backs up all sorts of filesystems - even Martian for all I know. So I
> mirror the entire hard drive to a backup hard drive of the same model
> and size.
Your description of ghost makes me a bit nervous. I conjecture from it
that ghost backs up partitions as disk images, not file by file. This has
two problems.
1) Since a partition image is backed up, it backs up empty blocks as well
as useful data, making the backup larger than necessary.
2) It is not possible to extract individual files from a backup, making it
impossible to revert a portion of a file system to a prior date. Restoring
individual files is a fairly common request.
If you mirror to a hard drive, can you read the file system on the
mirrored drive?
Can you not get the same effect from within Linux with dd? You should
still shut down certain processes, e.g. databases, before running it, but
you could leave other services running. That way you don't take the system
entirely off line while running the backup.
Tape is not entirely obsolete. 40 GB on a DDS 3 tape occupies a lot less
volume and is more mechanically robust than 40 GB on a hard drive.
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