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. It's easy to > find expensive solutions that work wonderfully. > > 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. Minimum > capacity for the smallest system is 80Gb and the largest system requires > ~200Gb to backup everything onto a single medium. I've tried to use the > Iomega REV autoloader as a solution and it sort of but not quite works. > In other words it isn't reliable, you can't count on it to work every > single time. The thing seems tempermental in that it sometimes wedges > the SCSI bus. Not useful. > > The backup solution needs to be reasonably portable so that it is > possible to carry the medium offsite each day for offsite storage. > > What types of solutions have worked for others?
I've been doing Disk to disk to tape (d2d2t) stuff along with partitioning my data. For example on one site I have $HOME and ClearCase about 40 GB. I have 1200GB of disk. Every night, that data gets rsync'd to a different directory on the disk store. Each week, sunday's backup gets promoted to a weekly directory. Each month, I archive to tape & store that off site. This is all the user data. Bear in mind that I don't have alot of data in this environment. I'm essentially doing a full every night. Because I use rsync, it's quick. I make OS images to DVD. I use Clonezilla for PCs/Linux and Flash archives for Solaris. These don't change that often. D2D brings a few benefits: disks are more reliable then tape (RAID makes them even more reliable) disks match the speed of the incoming data stream disks are faster then tape so your window is smaller disks are cheaper then tape (500 GB / $110 vs tape costs) Most restores happen within a week. If you need to go back beyond "the last version" it's not a backup. It's an archive. You can make a RAID 5 1.5 TB fileserver for under $1000. You'll spend that much on just a tape drive for the archives.
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