On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 10:18 -0500, Ben Scott wrote: > On Feb 5, 2008 9:24 AM, Dan Coutu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I have a small client (30 employees) using Linux servers that is > > struggling to find a robust and reliable backup solution that provides > > bare-metal recovery capability without costing over $10K. > > tar provides bare-metal recovery and is free and reliable. :) > > > The primary challenge so far has been hardware. They used to use 30Gb > > tapes but now that the servers are bigger this doesn't work. > > You can get a LTO-4 drive from Dell for $3200. 400 GB native > (uncompressed) capacity. Tapes are around $110 ($0.275/GB). > > Alternatively, the "external hard drive" solution is popular. With > 750 GB disks going for $160 ($0.213/GB), they're cheaper than tape, > even with the cost of the enclosure. And eSATA can be pretty darn > fast. And then you just need "rsync" or even "cp" instead of tar.
The downside to using external hard drives is the possibility of a primary failure only to discover that the backup disk is bad. For really important data (is there any other kind?) you'd want to duplicate the backup drive. We do this when we want to make sure there is a zero possibility of losing the customer's data. Given the low cost of disks and the backup speed I think using external hard drives make a lot of sense. -Alex P.S. Amanda has been discussed on this list before but the Amanda chapter from the book "UNIX Backup and Recovery" by W. Curtis Preston is online here: http://www.backupcentral.com/components/com_mambowiki/index.php/AMANDA > > > I've tried to use the Iomega REV ... > > In my experience, IOMega makes crap and always has. I know this > because I own several of their products, and have worked with hundreds > more. > > -- Ben > _______________________________________________ > gnhlug-discuss mailing list > gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org > http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/