Re: Small business backups solutions?
Brian Chabot wrote: So I've decided on the hard drive back up routine. My server (I'm ordering it in parts now in another window...) will have a 500GB SATA hard drive. I'll be adding a removable SATA enclosure from http://www.cru-dataport.com and getting carriers for a total of 3 more 500GB hard drives. In total, I have the live one (with I may or may not set up as a RAID array) with 500GB, and three backup drives of 500GB each in removable SATA carriers. Timely article about new developments in this idea: http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00029.htm Many - probably still most - normal motherboard SATA controllers can't do this, though the controllers built into some server boards can. Nvidia nForce-chipset motherboards in current versions of Windows are apparently hot-swap-capable, as are many chipsets under Linux, but don't assume that your motherboard will be. Ha! I'm using BOTH an nVidia chipset AND Linus on my set up. W00t! Brian ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Wed, 2008-02-06 at 20:16 -0500, Ben Scott wrote: and smart people do a full read-back-compare to verify after writing Don't the DDS-4 drives (and other quality drives) automatically read and compare when writing. There are separate read and write heads which allows write errors to be detected immediately. The cheap Travan drives do not check when writing. There's only one head. I've assumed that a verification pass was only essential with single head drives. -- Lloyd Kvam Venix Corp DLSLUG/GNHLUG library http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dlslug http://www.librarything.com/profile/dlslug http://www.librarything.com/rsshtml/recent/dlslug ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Feb 7, 2008 8:15 AM, Lloyd Kvam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: and smart people do a full read-back-compare to verify after writing Don't the DDS-4 drives (and other quality drives) automatically read and compare when writing. They do. I just checked, and it appears even DDS has this capability, according to the ECMA standard doc. LTO does, according to their website. DLT does, according to my memory. I've assumed that a verification pass was only essential with single head drives. RWW (Read-While-Write) verifies that the tape drive wrote what it was asked to write. RWW, however, does not verify that what's on the tape is actually a valid backup. Hardware and media is cheap compared to data; unless the backup window is too short, I prefer to do a full verify, which tests just about everything, from the software to the disks to the tape drive. I became aware of a bug in GNU tar this way. If an archive member with a long name was spanned across tapes, some metadata on the second tape was written incorrectly, causing tar to fall apart when it tried to read the data back in. As far as the tape drive was concerned, it had written was it was supposed to. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Feb 5, 2008 6:23 PM, Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Feb 5, 2008 6:11 PM, Bill McGonigle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: e.SATA lets you use S.M.A.R.T so you can know if a drive is ailing. s/can/might/ I've discovered SMART isn't always that smart. I've had drives which were actively returning media errors to the host adapter, and were then unable to complete the smartctl tests successfully, still report their overall SMART health status as good. I imagine this varies with manufacturer/drive/firmware/weather/etc. Just an FYI. Better to have SMART than not, for sure. Google had a white paper on drive reliability and SMART awhile ago. A week before that there was another by CERN? They both said SMART was not a reliable indicator of failure. They also didn't find much difference in the reliability of SCSI vs IDE/SATA. FWIW I dropped a laptop started getting lots of SMART errors. I put a new drive in the laptop and put the failing drive in an external USB case for shuttling data. I haven't gotten any errors from the drive since, but I'm not using it as much either. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Feb 6, 2008 12:07 AM, Bill McGonigle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I often ask, if your building has burned down, can you afford to lose a week's worth of data?. Yah, the only sane way to determine one's desired backup interval is by comparing cost of implementing a given interval with the cost of loosing the data over that interval. How much does loosing a day's worth of data cost? A week? An hour? How much more hardware will you have to buy to support hourly vs daily snapshots? And so on. In my experience I've had to deal with more bad backup tapes than backup drives. I find quality tape drives to be quite reliable within their rated specs. I suspect one problem is people aren't really conscious of those specs. For example, IIRC, DDS4 tapes are rated at 2000 pases. If any given spot on the tape has passed over the read/write head more than 2000 times, it is time to retire the tape. Since the tape is divided into tracks, and smart people do a full read-back-compare to verify after writing, a single backup run might mean 10 or 20 passes, and maybe even more on a hot spot like a logical tape label. I suspect Travan is rated at one pass. ;-) I don't know that there's much in the way of an established body of evidence for the reliability of removable HDDs which are frequently transported. It's still a relatively young idea. It will be interesting to see how that develops. I know I see more HDD failures in laptops than desktops, but they're more often spinning when moved, so that's not apples-to-apples. And very few folks write FEC data to the tapes ... The better drive technologies include FEC/ECC. I believe both LTO and SDLT do. They also include read while writing, where the drive reads the data back in immediately after it writes it, to make sure it got written properly. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
Lots of good info... But here's one suggestion for REALLY small businesses How convenient that I, too, am looking for just such a thing... In my case I have a small shop I'm putting together. I can't see my total data that I need to back up exceeding a couple huhundred gigs ...for a VERY long time. (Not much more than a handful of gigs unless I grow exceptionally fast...) So I've decided on the hard drive back up routine. My server (I'm ordering it in parts now in another window...) will have a 500GB SATA hard drive. I'll be adding a removable SATA enclosure from http://www.cru-dataport.com and getting carriers for a total of 3 more 500GB hard drives. In total, I have the live one (with I may or may not set up as a RAID array) with 500GB, and three backup drives of 500GB each in removable SATA carriers. Using any system I please to sync/mirror the removable to the live drive and then I'll have it able to have a recent on-site backup, an off-site backup, and one in the server at any given time. At the end of the day, I take the drive out and either replace it with the local or off-site backup. Total cost not counting the initial server: Software: Free. CRU DataPort 3 Complete package: $23.41 CRU Dataport 3 Carrier (2): (2 @ $23.45) $46.90 500GB HDD (3): (3 @ 99.99 on sale @ Tiger Direct) $299.97 __ Total Cost: $370.28 plus shipping. When your data grows beyond the example 500GB your upgrade costs are the costs of 3 more HDDs as long as you're still using SATA at that point. I REALLY don't see any reason to spend the time, money, and hassle on a tape drive system for anything smaller than the biggest HDD on the market right now. Brian ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On 2/5/08, 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? Dan Speaking of strictly the hardware, I have had a lot of good luck with Quantum Superloader3. It has a single LTO3 drive, and the basic model has an 8-slot carrier. You can upgrade it to a 16-slot system with a firmware upgrade and purchase of a 2nd tape carrier. The cost of an 8-slot autoloader is about $4500 right now. LTO3 tapes can handle about 400GB native and (supposedly) 800GB compressed, but I have never seen a system that could actually do 2:1 compression. I usually get about 580GB on a new tape. The tapes are about $40 a piece now that LTO4 is up and coming. You can carry the tapes offsite easily. But I would suggest leaving the autoloader mounted in a rack :-) As for software, if you are being cost concious, then look into Amanda (http://www.amanda.org). HTH, Kenny ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
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/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
There are some relatively low cost and reasonably high capacity NAS appliances out there that I think are attractive for this application. linksys example: http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C1childpagename=US %2FLayoutcid=1115416945617pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper I haven't used them personally, but would like to hear from people who have. NAS + rsync + cron = backup On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 09:24 -0500, Dan Coutu 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? Dan ___ 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/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
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. 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/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
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. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On 2/5/08, Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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). Um I LTO4 is supposed todo 800GB uncompressed. LTO3 does 400GB uncompressed. Is Dell selling something that is labeled as LTO4 that really isn't? 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. You can get 1TB drives (SATA) for around $250. I have done the disk to disk then to tape thing in the past. My setup was the 3 servers that I wanted to back up, and a backup server that had 2TB of usable disk space (4TB total, running RAID 0 + 1). I was using LVM on the servers that were to be backed up, and every 6 hours, I did an LVM snapshot of the data. I mounted the snapshot and rsync'd it over to the backup server. I then dumped the backups to tape from the storage box once a week. The only problem that I had wit this was resource utilization. Two of the boxes had data that were constantly changing, so I was rsyncing 200-300GB every time. 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. I stopped buying anything from them a few years ago. They have cheap going for them, but that is the quality, not just the price :-) ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Feb 5, 2008 10:35 AM, Kenny Lussier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You can get a LTO-4 drive from Dell for $3200. 400 GB native (uncompressed) capacity. Tapes are around $110 ($0.275/GB). Um I LTO4 is supposed todo 800GB uncompressed. Oh, you're right. I had just checked quickly, and the page said 800 GB with a footnote. I just assumed they were doing the typical marketing thing (i.e., lying), and cut the number in half. Turns out they were being honest; the footnote is about 1 GB = 10^9. Color me surprised. Sorry for the bad information. So that means $0.138/GB. So tape is still cheaper than disk. (For the media. Factor in the tape drive... not so much.) With 750 GB disks going for $160 ($0.213/GB) 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. You can get 1TB drives (SATA) for around $250. Right, but that's $0.25/GB. Smaller disks are cheaper, unless your data set is only just over 750 GB and not expected to grow. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 11:09 -0500, Ben Scott wrote: On Feb 5, 2008 10:35 AM, Kenny Lussier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You can get a LTO-4 drive from Dell for $3200. 400 GB native (uncompressed) capacity. Tapes are around $110 ($0.275/GB). Um I LTO4 is supposed todo 800GB uncompressed. Oh, you're right. I had just checked quickly, and the page said 800 GB with a footnote. I just assumed they were doing the typical marketing thing (i.e., lying), and cut the number in half. Turns out they were being honest; the footnote is about 1 GB = 10^9. Color me surprised. Sorry for the bad information. So that means $0.138/GB. So tape is still cheaper than disk. (For the media. Factor in the tape drive... not so much.) It's been my experience that these tape drives (and I'm not necessarily talking about this specific model) last about 3 years or so. At that point you either need to buy a replacement or have the thing refurbished which seems to cost about half price. Not only that but you really need to pay attention to the tapes malfunctioning because these guys are usually set up with minimal user intervention. Customers typically are clueless that their tape systems are starting to fall apart and it can be going on for a while before the IT staff is notified or trips over a log that indicates problems are cropping up. -Alex With 750 GB disks going for $160 ($0.213/GB) 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. You can get 1TB drives (SATA) for around $250. Right, but that's $0.25/GB. Smaller disks are cheaper, unless your data set is only just over 750 GB and not expected to grow. -- 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/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On 2/5/08, Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You can get 1TB drives (SATA) for around $250. Right, but that's $0.25/GB. Smaller disks are cheaper, unless your data set is only just over 750 GB and not expected to grow. Well, the problem with disk to disk in general is that the space is finite. Unless you have a big JBOD with an expandable RAID system, then when you hit the end of the disk, you're done. You can always add more tapes to a tape set. Not to mention that LTO4 is 800GB uncompressed, and (supposedly) 1.6TB compressed, and the prices on them should be dropping soon. So an 8-tape autoloader can theoretically hold 12.8TB before needing new tapes. In reality, you would probably be lucky to get 1TB per tape, dropping you down to 8TB before needing to rotate tapes. And really, even when you add the price of an autoloader, the price isn't that much. I just spec'd out the autoloader that Dell is selling, and added everything under the sun to it except backup software. So, the autoloader with 20 LTO3 tapes comes to $6717. If you divide that by GB in the 20 tapes (20*400GB), you come to $0.83/GB. It is considerably higher then the disk price, but given that it is expandable and scalable, it may be worth it. That said, Dell's price is a little high for my taste :-) ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 12:16 -0500, Kenny Lussier wrote: Well, the problem with disk to disk in general is that the space is finite. I think a second problem with backing up to disk is that it's generally on-site and vulnerable to fires and other threats to the original data. If you have the bandwidth to backup to remote disks, then you might choose to live with the finite disk space. Otherwise I think you need backup media that can be stored off-site. -- Lloyd Kvam Venix Corp DLSLUG/GNHLUG library http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dlslug http://www.librarything.com/profile/dlslug http://www.librarything.com/rsshtml/recent/dlslug ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 13:00 -0500, Lloyd Kvam wrote: On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 12:16 -0500, Kenny Lussier wrote: Well, the problem with disk to disk in general is that the space is finite. I think a second problem with backing up to disk is that it's generally on-site and vulnerable to fires and other threats to the original data. If you have the bandwidth to backup to remote disks, then you might choose to live with the finite disk space. Otherwise I think you need backup media that can be stored off-site. When it's appropriate (the customer hasn't got terabytes of storage) I have them purchase a 2.5 inch USB hard drive. They typically weigh 5 - 8 ozs. Today, Overstock.com has a Western Digital Passport 250 GB external hard drive for $139.95. The customer has a regular backup running overnight and when they come to work they run a small script which transfers the backup to the removable hard drive. They take it with them when they leave at the end of the day. These drives although reasonably rugged can't take a drop while they're spinning. Furthermore I've had one customer kick the USB connector (it was plugged into the front of the system) and smoke the drive. On the other hand I've got a customer who has been using the same small hard drive for about 3 years without problems. Given how inexpensive these drives are they are certainly cheap enough to replace should they be lost or damaged. One other caveat is that the backup should be encrypted if there is really sensitive data stored. -Alex ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Tuesday 05 February 2008 13:14, Alex Hewitt wrote: overnight and when they come to work they run a small script which transfers the backup to the removable hard drive. They take it with them when they leave at the end of the day. These drives although reasonably rugged can't take a drop while they're spinning. Furthermore I've had Unless they've got a rotation of several drives, this is a worthless as an off-site backups scenario. If they go next door for lunch during the day and a fire erupts, who will get the drive? It's unreasonable to think they won't leave it at their desk and it's a bad idea to leave it in the car on a very hot or cold day. In order for off-site backups to work, you need at least 3 copies (perhaps of varying dates) of the data to ensure that both of two copies are not in the same place at once. -N ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
Alex Hewitt wrote: On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 13:00 -0500, Lloyd Kvam wrote: On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 12:16 -0500, Kenny Lussier wrote: Well, the problem with disk to disk in general is that the space is finite. I think a second problem with backing up to disk is that it's generally on-site and vulnerable to fires and other threats to the original data. If you have the bandwidth to backup to remote disks, then you might choose to live with the finite disk space. Otherwise I think you need backup media that can be stored off-site. When it's appropriate (the customer hasn't got terabytes of storage) I have them purchase a 2.5 inch USB hard drive. They typically weigh 5 - 8 ozs. Today, Overstock.com has a Western Digital Passport 250 GB external hard drive for $139.95. The customer has a regular backup running overnight and when they come to work they run a small script which transfers the backup to the removable hard drive. They take it with them when they leave at the end of the day. These drives although reasonably rugged can't take a drop while they're spinning. Furthermore I've had one customer kick the USB connector (it was plugged into the front of the system) and smoke the drive. On the other hand I've got a customer who has been using the same small hard drive for about 3 years without problems. Given how inexpensive these drives are they are certainly cheap enough to replace should they be lost or damaged. One other caveat is that the backup should be encrypted if there is really sensitive data stored. -Alex The annoyance with USB drives is their tendency to have variable device names. If you're able to label a drive and retain the label that helps a lot. But if you rewrite the entire drive with each backup, including the label, then that doesn't work so well. Dan ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
[aggregate reply to multiple people] On Feb 5, 2008 12:03 PM, Alex Hewitt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's been my experience that these tape drives (and I'm not necessarily talking about this specific model) last about 3 years or so. It depends on a lot of factors. The super-cheap drives -- like QIC/Travan -- are basically a crap shoot. DLT and even DDS (4mm DAT), if used properly, will likely outlast the computer they're in. That means clean them when indicated, retire tapes after rated use (they don't last forever), and don't use them in an excessively dusty environment. Not only that but you really need to pay attention to the tapes malfunctioning because these guys are usually set up with minimal user intervention. An unsupervised backup system is arguably worse than no backup system at all. At least when you have nothing, you're not deluding yourself into thinking you're protected. By supervised, I mean things like cleaning when indicated, retiring tapes when appropriate, reading the backup reports to make sure they're functioning properly, and doing periodic test restores. I've seen places reguarly changing tapes on their dead backup drive. My personal favorite, though, was the client who purchased a tape drive and tapes, but never took the tapes out of their shrink-wrap package. Most of the above applies equally well to CD, DVD, HDD, or punched cards, too. Hard drives don't like high temperatures, and will fail eventually, just like tape drives. On Feb 5, 2008 12:16 PM, Kenny Lussier [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You can get 1TB drives (SATA) for around $250. Right, but that's $0.25/GB. Smaller disks are cheaper, unless your data set is only just over 750 GB and not expected to grow. Well, the problem with disk to disk in general is that the space is finite. You misunderstand my point. Cost-per-gigabyte is lower for the 750 GB drives vs the 1000 GB drives. If you've got well under 750 GB, buying more doesn't make sense. If you've got 1 GB, you're buying multiple drives anyway. Unless you happen to be right around 800 GB (won't quite fit on 750 GB, but not going to go over 1 GB any time soon) it's more economical to buy two 750 GB drives vs just one 1 GB drive. You can always add more tapes to a tape set. You can always add more disks to a disk set. Keep in mind that I'm not suggesting someone buy *just one* external hard disk. I'm talking about using hard disk drives as a replacement for tapes. So if you would have 12 tapesets in your backup scheme, you would have 12 disksets instead. (Where tapeset or diskset may mean just one tape/disk.) If you're carrying tapes off-site (and you should), you carry the disks instead. This is why you have to factor the cost of the external disk enclosure into the cost accounting. But those are cheap, too. It gets tricky when you start comparing disks and tapes, because one tape drive can service many media (so the cost of the drive is amortized over all the tapes), but each hard disk needs its own enclosure. In general, tape becomes cheaper the more mediasets you have. General public service message: Backing up to a single mediaset, while a lot better than nothing, is still a limited data protection solution. A single mediaset will only protect against data loss discovered within your backup interval. Generally, that's nightly or weekly. So it will protect against catastrophic disk failure, rm -rf /, that kind of thing. But there are many other ways to loose data. Examples: Accidentally deleting just one extra file and not noticing right away. A slowly failing disk, where some sectors are bad but you don't notice until you go to read them. A software bug scrambles a key database table, but you don't notice half the records are garbage until the end-of-month report. Disgruntled employee modifying logs to cover their tracks. An outside attacker or malicious software overwrites every disk it can find, including the backup disk. Fire. Flood. Theft. A single backup mediaset won't protect against these. It's fairly simple to implement a multi-tiered rotation. The most common scenario: Backup everything in full every night. Have daily tapes for Mon, Tue, Wed, and Thr. Have weekly tapes for Week2, Week3, Week4, Week5, that get used on Fridays. Have monthly tapes (Jan, Feb, ..., Dec) that get used on the first Friday of each month. This gives you automatic adaptive granularity -- more backups of more recent changes, fewer of older data. This tends to fit well with most data loss scenarios. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 15:24 -0500, Ben Scott wrote: It's fairly simple to implement a multi-tiered rotation. The most common scenario: Backup everything in full every night. Have daily tapes for Mon, Tue, Wed, and Thr. Have weekly tapes for Week2, Week3, Week4, Week5, that get used on Fridays. Have monthly tapes (Jan, Feb, ..., Dec) that get used on the first Friday of each month. This gives you automatic adaptive granularity -- more backups of more recent changes, fewer of older data. This tends to fit well with most data loss scenarios. An alternative to tiering the tapes, is to tier data to disk. The packages rdiff-backup and dirvish provide for date-layered backups on disk. dirvish uses hardlinks to avoid multiple copies. rdiff saves deltas to regenerate files to a point in time. Lost files are easily restored from rdiff or dirvish. Then amanda can be used to write tapes for off site storage. Getting amanda to tier your tapes is probably not worth the effort. Use backup disks rather than tapes if you prefer. -- Lloyd Kvam Venix Corp DLSLUG/GNHLUG library http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dlslug http://www.librarything.com/profile/dlslug http://www.librarything.com/rsshtml/recent/dlslug ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Feb 5, 2008 4:19 PM, Lloyd Kvam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 15:24 -0500, Ben Scott wrote: It's fairly simple to implement a multi-tiered rotation. The most common scenario: Backup everything in full every night. Have daily tapes for Mon, Tue, Wed, and Thr. Have weekly tapes for Week2, Week3, Week4, Week5, that get used on Fridays. Have monthly tapes (Jan, Feb, ..., Dec) that get used on the first Friday of each month. This gives you automatic adaptive granularity -- more backups of more recent changes, fewer of older data. This tends to fit well with most data loss scenarios. An alternative to tiering the tapes, is to tier data to disk. The packages rdiff-backup and dirvish provide for date-layered backups on disk. dirvish uses hardlinks to avoid multiple copies. rdiff saves deltas to regenerate files to a point in time. Lost files are easily restored from rdiff or dirvish. Then amanda can be used to write tapes for off site storage. Getting amanda to tier your tapes is probably not worth the effort. Use backup disks rather than tapes if you prefer. Exactly. The disks have the advantage of matching the speed of the input data. Tapes have 2 speeds: fast and stopped. If the data is arriving too slowly, they stop, backup, and start again. This is called shoeshining and can greatly increase the time to backup. Having nearline backups on disk of recent data will typically decrease your restore time as well. By all means, continue to make a copy offsite on tape/disk/flash/DVD/CD/floppy. Your copy will be made faster as well. btw - for those doing backups to removable drives, how long does the data stick around when the drive isn't turned on? The tape manufacturers have this figure. Do the drive makers test for it? ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Feb 5, 2008, at 09:24, Dan Coutu wrote: 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. My goodness. I saw exactly the same situation at another shop. Small techno-world :) My suggestion to them was to use a RAID-10 with one half on removable disks and swap among 3 mirror sets, keeping two offsite, or at least one in transit. e.SATA lets you use S.M.A.R.T so you can know if a drive is ailing. I then run rsnapshot over these. rsync3 with the renamed-files patch is the cat's pajamas. This is basically how I have my internal backups structured. That job spec is still hung up in purchasing or something... -Bill - Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 603.252.2606 http://www.bfccomputing.com/Page: 603.442.1833 Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Feb 5, 2008 6:11 PM, Bill McGonigle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: e.SATA lets you use S.M.A.R.T so you can know if a drive is ailing. s/can/might/ I've discovered SMART isn't always that smart. I've had drives which were actively returning media errors to the host adapter, and were then unable to complete the smartctl tests successfully, still report their overall SMART health status as good. I imagine this varies with manufacturer/drive/firmware/weather/etc. Just an FYI. Better to have SMART than not, for sure. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
sounds good. I installed rockbox on my iPod and love it. I thought I missed the last months meeting due to the snow storm. I am glad its been rescheduled. - Original Message - From: Ben Scott [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Greater NH Linux User Group gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2008 6:23 PM Subject: Re: Small business backups solutions? On Feb 5, 2008 6:11 PM, Bill McGonigle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: e.SATA lets you use S.M.A.R.T so you can know if a drive is ailing. s/can/might/ I've discovered SMART isn't always that smart. I've had drives which were actively returning media errors to the host adapter, and were then unable to complete the smartctl tests successfully, still report their overall SMART health status as good. I imagine this varies with manufacturer/drive/firmware/weather/etc. Just an FYI. Better to have SMART than not, for sure. -- 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/
Re: Small business backups solutions?
On Feb 5, 2008, at 18:23, Ben Scott wrote: I've discovered SMART isn't always that smart. I've had drives which were actively returning media errors to the host adapter, and were then unable to complete the smartctl tests successfully, still report their overall SMART health status as good. I imagine this varies with manufacturer/drive/firmware/weather/etc. Just an FYI. Better to have SMART than not, for sure. Good point. What I was thinking is, If SMART is complaining you know to pull the drive. False positives get very little slack in backups. But you're right, false negatives can exist. One nice thing about my setup is that all the blocks on the moved device are exercised on RAID-1 rebuild. Linux is pretty dumb that way, which works out nicely. And having two copies offsite helps the odds, even if one drive is bad, you'll have another from the week (or whatever) before. You can throw redundancy at that depending on your tolerance for data loss. I often ask, if your building has burned down, can you afford to lose a week's worth of data?. That usually changes minds about needing up-to-the-minute offsite backups. In my experience I've had to deal with more bad backup tapes than backup drives. I've also had tapes that apparently can be read only on the drive that wrote them. And very few folks write FEC data to the tapes (PAR can be used, and I do on important optical archives, but is *so* slow to calculate). Warts all around. -Bill - Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 603.252.2606 http://www.bfccomputing.com/Page: 603.442.1833 Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
