On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Jonathan Wilson wrote:
> Howdy,
>
> Now that we've spent a good deal of time setting up our system of servers, it's
>occurred to us that we should be dome something more rigorous then once a week manual
>"cp -a /etc /backup/$DATE"
>
[snip]
>
> 8. It needs to have some sort of failover/failproof -ness. Something like it emails
>2 other servers whenever the job is complete. Something should run on the other
>servers that checks for that email every night. If they don't receive the email they
>can email the admins and/or page their beepers.
>
> 9. (kind of a repeat) We MUST be able to do a quick restore of a whole drive in case
>of emergency. I've never had to restore a whole drive before, but I've been around
>people that /thought/ they had a back up system going well, and after a disk failure,
>they found out the hard way that they didn't really have a way to restore a whole
>drive. That's no good. What's the best solution - some sort of drive image we can dd
>back onto the drive? That would take a LOT of space. The idea here is we need a total
>restore - we don't have time to reinstall Linux form our distro CD then manually copy
>the files we need out of our backups.
>
>
> Any and all advise is very much appreciated. I'd really like to hear from people who
>have working backup systems.
>
> Is there anything I forgot, or does anyone see something wrong with anything I said?
>
Well, I don't have any magic bullet for you, but I would suggest that
you set up your "critical" boxes (the ones that you won't have time
to reinstall from scratch) using a RAID system, so that if one drive
fails, you can just slap a new one in and rebuild the raid. If you
were to do something like a mirrored raid system (two identical raid
systems) the chances of having EVERYTHING blow up are negligible.
Granted this would be expensive (talking say 6 - 10 disks per
machine...) but it would be nearly foolproof. If you include backups
on CD of your data directories (customer data, source code, etc) on a
regular basis, you should be protected against just about anything
short of an A-bomb! :-)
Just a few ideas for you to consider...
John
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