On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, John LeMay wrote:
Matt Stamm wrote:
Any suggestions on tape drives and software would be appreciated. Matt Of course you could go with other methods of backup such as RAID 1 mirroring, CD-RW media, or ftp'ing data to another machine. In some scenarios these work just fine. It just depends on your environment, budget, and requirements.
Oh my god, do I feel 'qualified' to opine here. I handle a Linux, three HP and one Solaris machine here. I shall share all the cases that we have handled so far. 1. Backup on tape drives. Existings drives are DDS-1. You know, total native capacity equal to 2 GB. On HP we used to use SAM and control through it. And similar tools on Solaris. Writing to tapes was painful - because of required intervention. We had to manually change the cassettes. :-( 2. Mirroring lets you have a machine up all the time, in case a drive fails. The data is backed up in a dynamic fashion, I mean, it is always available to you at run time. Current state of the system would be backed up. I am not sure whether you can keep chanding mirrored disks, to keep a backup. 3. What I did here - is as follows. As we have a LAN here, all the machines here shutdown all applications, logout all users at 1:oo am, disable further logins and use their native applications for creating backups. On HP, we use fbackup. On linux we use tar. Each have their own options of creating backup archives. Now, all these archives are written to another cheap PC's IDE hdd over NFS. So there is one PC - which springs into heavy action at night, taking inputs from all machines. Network can take this load, and so can this PC. So simultaneous backup of some 5 machines finishes in three hours. After the backups finish, the logins are enabled again, applications are started, databases are started and things continue in the morning as if nothing happened. We take a differential backup daily and a full backup weekly. Of course, the process is fully automated. 4. An even better way to do backups would be to use dd command with disks of exactly the same geometry. Disk-A to be backed up on it's twin Disk-AA. Disk B on Disk BB and so on. This can be automatic too - and tuned to your hardware for speed [by altering block size in ibs/obs for dd]. If one disk goes bad, you can replace it with another - without hassle. But this is not archival of files. It is restoration in case of hardware failure. -- Rohit +9122 5692 2101 D2,floor-3,Chandivali : SDE : TLSI : 9821394599@bplmobile.com The information below is compulsorily added for non-mahindrabt recepients. ********************************************************* Disclaimer This message (including any attachments) contains confidential information intended for a specific individual and purpose, and is protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete this message and are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited. ********************************************************* Visit us at http://www.mahindrabt.com