Re: [OT] Backup solutions - my preferences
On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 03:33:12PM -0800, Alvin Oga wrote: fun stuff... :-) Oh, yeah! On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Dave Sherohman wrote: Haven't used amanda, have you? Just set yourself up with a decent-sized holding disk and it's not a problem. (Your backups will yes... if one has the holding disk space.. you have backups already ... no tape needed ?? Well, yeah, kinda... It is just a holding area, after all. Your backups are not intended to remain there any longer than it takes to transfer them to tape. - at the time i played w/ amanda... amanda required this holding area and the comp didnt have $$$ for mroe disks But it sounds like you're buying the disk now anyhow, so... holding disk. Just be sure the holding disk is a separate physical device to minimize the chance of losing it if the system's primary drive fails. backups should always be done on a different server and preferably on a different 110v circuit Agreed, if you intend to use the holding disk as a primary repository for your backups. Its intended purpose is to allow backups to be run faster than the actual backup device is capable of writing data to tape, but it also works well as failover in case of problems with the tape drive, tapes not getting changed, etc. Within the bounds of the intended purpose, putting it in a different server is likely to be counterproductive since access speed would be reduced. I presume that's a home system, right? I can't think of any sort of professional setup where you would have that much data to back up and not have the money for a tape changer. i do not do backup stuff for workstations/homes... need real $$$ for real backups ... for supposedly real work done :-) Yup. Basically my point: If you have a TB of real data to back up, I can't imagine that it wouldn't be worth enough to warrant either buying a robot or hiring a monkey to swap tapes as needed. - i want the backup to be live within a few minutes of the main server going down for whatever reason Sounds like you want a redundant server more than a backup solution. no ... if they want it live... its just change the ip# form backup to real and you're live and online... If you've got a live backup that can be brought online with just an IP address change, I'd call that a redundant server... which implies they must have the $$$ and disk space for these backups or cluster or ?? really do lose few grand of real $$$ if the server goes down for 5 minutes - so they better plan everything for all contingencies Quite true. - i assume yesterdays or last weeks tape/disk/backups is BAD and can still receover everything from day before or tonights backup ... BAD in what way? Obsolete? That's why you do nightly incrementals. Or do you expect the media to decay within 48 hours? backups go back for dumb reasons The reasons you give would all spoil a backup from 5 minutes ago just as readily as one from yesterday or last week. What I was wondering about was why you assume 'yesterdays or last weeks' tape/disk/ backups is BAD. - gotta keep people out of the loop to avoid backup problems Yup. - i can lose 2 FULL backups and still recover everything Cool. So can I - I run a one-week backup cycle and keep three weeks' worth of tapes. for 7 days you will not have proper backup if the last full backup is faulty ?? In theory, yeah, that's possible. In practice, going back to a two- or three-week old full and then applying all the daily incrementals will be equivalent (aside from taking more time to perform) in almost all cases. Also keep in mind that amanda spreads fulls out over the dump cycle rather than doing them all at once, so a single tape failure can't take out all of my most recent fulls. (The down side, of course, is that it will take out at least one of them.) -- The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened. - Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] Backup solutions - my preferences
On 20 Mar 2003, Glenn English wrote: On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 08:59, Bob Paige wrote: Questions: 1) what is better for backup, tape, or CD? (I already have a CD burner) 2) if tape, what is a good/inexpensive product to use? 3) what software works best? IMHO, 1) tape - can easily back up the entire system (and a small network) 2) DDS - others are faster, but they cost more 3) amanda, amanda, and amanda - command line, cron-able, free, and very reliable i dont have time to play with tapes.. daily changing it.. - forget one day... and you're hosed if you're using tapes for weekly offline backups.. no problem find /etc /home /... -mtime -90 -type f | tar zcvf /dev/tape -T - ( 90 days worth of changes ) i prefer 100GB - 1TB of disks to be backed up to other disks ... ( tapes are too small for full backups and definitely too slow ) - i do daily, weekly, monthly incrementals - i want the backup to be live within a few minutes of the main server going down for whatever reason - i assume yesterdays or last weeks tape/disk/backups is BAD and can still receover everything from day before or tonights backup ... - i want a hands off backup... if i go away for vacation for a week/month... the systems are still properly backed up ( semi-guaranteed ) - i can lose 2 FULL backups and still recover everything backup example scripts and why backups fail too http://www.linux-backup.net/app.gwif.html c ya alvin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] Backup solutions - my preferences
On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 01:04:08PM -0800, Alvin Oga wrote: On 20 Mar 2003, Glenn English wrote: 1) tape - can easily back up the entire system (and a small network) 2) DDS - others are faster, but they cost more 3) amanda, amanda, and amanda - command line, cron-able, free, and very reliable Agreed! i dont have time to play with tapes.. daily changing it.. - forget one day... and you're hosed Haven't used amanda, have you? Just set yourself up with a decent-sized holding disk and it's not a problem. (Your backups will finish fast, too.) My amanda server at work can easily run a week's worth of backups without needing a tape, just saving it all up on the holding disk. Just be sure the holding disk is a separate physical device to minimize the chance of losing it if the system's primary drive fails. Or, of course, if you have the money to spare, you can buy a changer and let the robot play with tapes for you. i prefer 100GB - 1TB of disks to be backed up to other disks ... ( tapes are too small for full backups and definitely too slow ) I presume that's a home system, right? I can't think of any sort of professional setup where you would have that much data to back up and not have the money for a tape changer. By way of comparison, I work at a manufacturing plant. Home directories for ~80 users, plus the company databases total out to a little under 30G. Using amanda, I'm getting full dumps of everything at least once a week, with nightly incrementals of anything that's not doing a full. Totals out to about 7G a night going onto tape, taking 13 minutes to collect all the data onto the holding disk and a three and a half to four hours to write it to tape. On the 20G tapes I currently use, I could handle pretty close to 100G without any additional hardware or changes to my backup configuration, although my 30G holding disk would only handle one or two days' backups without a tape change, rather than a week. Dumps to holding disk would still take well under an hour and writing the tape would be under half a day. So what's too small and definitely too slow there? - i want the backup to be live within a few minutes of the main server going down for whatever reason Sounds like you want a redundant server more than a backup solution. Even if no human intervention is required, you're going to need more than a few minutes to copy 100GB-1TB from one hard drive to another. - i assume yesterdays or last weeks tape/disk/backups is BAD and can still receover everything from day before or tonights backup ... BAD in what way? Obsolete? That's why you do nightly incrementals. Or do you expect the media to decay within 48 hours? - i want a hands off backup... if i go away for vacation for a week/month... the systems are still properly backed up ( semi-guaranteed ) That's exactly what you get from amanda with a suitably large holding disk or (preferably) a changer. - i can lose 2 FULL backups and still recover everything Cool. So can I - I run a one-week backup cycle and keep three weeks' worth of tapes. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't use disks if that's what makes you happy. I don't care how (or even if) you back it up. But your criticisms of tape are, by and large, incorrect and/or misleading. I only mean to correct them. -- The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened. - Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] Backup solutions - my preferences
On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 14:54, Dave Sherohman wrote: On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 01:04:08PM -0800, Alvin Oga wrote: i dont have time to play with tapes.. daily changing it.. - forget one day... and you're hosed Haven't used amanda, have you? Just set yourself up with a decent-sized holding disk and it's not a problem. (Your backups will finish fast, too.) My amanda server at work can easily run a week's worth of backups without needing a tape, just saving it all up on the holding disk. Just be sure the holding disk is a separate physical device to minimize the chance of losing it if the system's primary drive fails. That's the way I use it - flush the backups to tape every Saturday morning. Downside is that you can lose a week's data is/when the holding disk dies. i prefer 100GB - 1TB of disks to be backed up to other disks ... ( tapes are too small for full backups and definitely too slow ) - i want the backup to be live within a few minutes of the main server going down for whatever reason Yup. Different philosophy. If you want fast, random access to the backed up data, tape is definitely not the medium of choice. If you want to use the backup only for restores, disks are way too expensive. One of the major benefits of amanda is that backed up data are stored in a well known format (GNU tar or cpio - your choice). So in case of major disaster, you don't even need the amanda software for a bare metal recovery; a floppy with a tape driver and tar/cpio is enough. So I'm told - haven't been there (yet). Another cool solution, in some situations, is rsync. I've set up rsync to use an ssh connection to sync files over the Internet. The first time, rsync will copy the entire file. After that it copies only the differences - takes only a few seconds to maintain an offsite copy of the company books, a 4.5MB file. http://www.rsync.org/ http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/tech_report/node2.html I don't care how (or even if) you back it up. If it's a playpen computer, don't worry about it. If it's for real, I do care. Is the only copy of 10 years of your bank account(s) on your disk? Is the computer a server with lots of fine-tuned config files? *Please* back up, and do a good job of it. My heart sinks when I have to tell somebody they've just lost vast quantities of data, and there's nothing to be done about it except maybe to go through years of bank statements and re-enter it all by hand. -- Glenn English [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] Backup solutions - my preferences
fun stuff... :-) On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Dave Sherohman wrote: i dont have time to play with tapes.. daily changing it.. - forget one day... and you're hosed Haven't used amanda, have you? Just set yourself up with a decent-sized holding disk and it's not a problem. (Your backups will yes... if one has the holding disk space.. you have backups already ... no tape needed ?? - at the time i played w/ amanda... amanda required this holding area and the comp didnt have $$$ for mroe disks holding disk. Just be sure the holding disk is a separate physical device to minimize the chance of losing it if the system's primary drive fails. backups should always be done on a different server and preferably on a different 110v circuit i prefer 100GB - 1TB of disks to be backed up to other disks ... ( tapes are too small for full backups and definitely too slow ) I presume that's a home system, right? I can't think of any sort of professional setup where you would have that much data to back up and not have the money for a tape changer. i backup Terabytes or 10's of Terabytes of data ... when i get called for backup stuff... i do not do backup stuff for workstations/homes... need real $$$ for real backups ... for supposedly real work done :-) By way of comparison, I work at a manufacturing plant. Home directories for ~80 users, plus the company databases total out to a little under 30G. size of data needed depends on the data those users create ... not doing a full. Totals out to about 7G a night going onto tape, taking 13 minutes to collect all the data onto the holding disk and a three and a half to four hours to write it to tape. good ... :-) - i want the backup to be live within a few minutes of the main server going down for whatever reason Sounds like you want a redundant server more than a backup solution. i have 3 redundant backups on a typical backup system Even if no human intervention is required, you're going to need more than a few minutes to copy 100GB-1TB from one hard drive to another. normally... i keep backups in tgz file though... but.. no ... if they want it live... its just change the ip# form backup to real and you're live and online... which implies they must have the $$$ and disk space for these backups or cluster or ?? really do lose few grand of real $$$ if the server goes down for 5 minutes - so they better plan everything for all contingencies ( and of course joe blow will be on vacation at the time ( the server or disks decides to get sick - i assume yesterdays or last weeks tape/disk/backups is BAD and can still receover everything from day before or tonights backup ... BAD in what way? Obsolete? That's why you do nightly incrementals. Or do you expect the media to decay within 48 hours? backups go back for dumb reasons - disk being full is the most common backup problems - somebody played witht he patch panel - power loss - somebody hit reset on one of their pc that nfs mounted a server ... and nfs dies or crawls.. - gazillion reasons why backups fail - gotta keep people out of the loop to avoid backup problems - i can lose 2 FULL backups and still recover everything Cool. So can I - I run a one-week backup cycle and keep three weeks' worth of tapes. for 7 days you will not have proper backup if the last full backup is faulty ?? i run incremental backup across 30 days in addition to the full backup that we assume worked ... but if it fails ... the 30 or 90 day incremental backups will compensate for any failed full backup - i keep 90 - 180 days of backups depending on data/disks available ( probably an overkill .. ( but i want a clean backup if a hacker had been sitting in ( the network for 30 dayz before they wake up and start playing - and yeah.. one has other problems if you didnt notice a trojan floating around for 30 days... but it will happen.. c ya alvin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [OT] Backup solutions - my preferences
Haven't used amanda, have you? Just set yourself up with a decent-sized holding disk and it's not a problem. (Your backups will finish fast, too.) My amanda server at work can easily run a week's worth of backups without needing a tape, just saving it all up on the holding disk. Just be sure the holding disk is a separate physical device to minimize the chance of losing it if the system's primary drive fails. I would like to use CDR instead of tape, but I've heard that Amanda requires you to use a new tape for each session (good or bad). If I wait until the end of the week, assuming I've accumulated only 500-600MB of changes, will it back it all up onto the single CDR? What if it accumulated more than would fit on a disk, would it span multiple disks? Also, if you wait until the end of the week, does Amanda keep multiple generations of the files modified during that week in the holding disk, or only the most recent modification? -- Bobman -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
