I also have used dirvish (dirvish.org) for years, both in my office and
at my client sites. Depending on circumstances, I use a variety of
storage solutions:
- For small sites, I use a USB disk drive, which I automount when needed
and dismount when it's idle. Of course, you could do the mounts by
hand, too. I usually have 3 or more disks, which I rotate off-site on a
regular basis. Rotation means a fire doesn't destroy your machine *and*
its only back-up. It also gives you some coverage in case of a drive
failure on your back-up drive.
- For larger sites, I use a full size hard drive or a collection of
drives in hot-swap SATA enclosures. I use the automounter the same, and
rotate them out as needed.
- For sites that have multiple locations, I have two dirvish
installations at different locations. Each backs up the "other" site to
local, RAID-ed hard disks, which just live there permanently.
I've done full system restores from Dirvish. There are a few things
Dirvish doesn't get on the back-ups, and most back-ups don't get these
either. These include:
- the boot sector
- partition layouts
- databases. Dirvish backs up database files, but they're probably not
any good unless the database server was down at the time. You can use
the preclient setting in dirvish to shut the database down, or if it
can't come down then use its native utilities to back it up to a flat
file, and let dirvish capture that.
I have code that dumps a lot of key information about a system (like the
partition layout) to the local disk on a weekly basis, and dirvish
captures that. That gives me the info I need to, say, rebuild a trashed
partition layout on an otherwise sound disk.
Dirvish is a "pull" backup approach, in that it runs in one place but
can pull data from multiple machines if that's of interest to you.
An alternative from a few years back is duplicity. I'm not sure of the
current state of it, so you'll have to see if it's still active, but I
suspect it is.
Duplicity is a push solution, in that it runs on the machine that is to
be backed up, and stores the data on a remote machine. Duplicity is
able to use cloud storage in addition to remote solutions. Push
solutions are good when your storage is available to you, but you can't
otherwise manage the remote machine (e.g. can't install your own
software, set up cron jobs, etc.). They are fine for small set-ups of
just a machine or two, but don't scale well because you have to install
them individually on each machine that needs back-ups. You also have to
monitor the job on each machine to make sure it's working. Pull
solutions like dirvish can handle an arbitrary number of machines in a
single run, assuming you have a large enough back-up window.
Good luck. Back ups are worth the effort. They've saved me many times.
-B.
--
Brian P. Martin, Chief Consultant
Martin Consulting Services, Inc.
Phone: 503-617-4500
E-mail: br...@martinconsulting.com
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