[Gllug] Advice on backup options

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Wed, 2004-07-07 at 19:57, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Mike Brodbelt wrote:

> However, all good points and I will bring these up when pressing for
> the cash to build the optimum solution.

Do - backups aren't the place to cut corners....

> > The backup controller's house burns down on Thursday night. Game over.
> 
> Erm, no.  As you'll recall, I said I didn't want all the backups and
> the data to be in the same place at the same time.

But your diagram and descriptive text gives the definite impression that
both backup drives would be in the controllers house. OK - you'd still
have the actual data, but user errors are pretty common, and it doesn't
have to be a fire. His bathroom floods, drives get soaked, and a user
picks that morning to accidentally delete the wrong directory. It's not
*that* unlikely.

> > You need some kind of incremental solution. You need offsite storage.
> > Despite how cheap IDE disks are, I still think that tape is the only
> > sensible option. Using a NAS box as a secondary when you have cash to
> > burn is fine, but tape is easy to put in a safe, doesn't lose data when
> > you drop it on the floor, and a whole host of other things.
> 
> Definitely important.
> 
> > If you're concerned about cost get a DDS drive - they can be had cheaply
> > now. 25 quid from ebay if you're really scraping the barrel:-
> 
> Not enough space, though I guess they can go incremental.  Incremental
> backups scare me...  I'm just not convinced...

Span across multiple tapes if you need to. Tape is cheap.... Do a level
0 on each filesystem weekly, and then level 1 or 2 on other nights.
Amanda manages all this for you, and will do on the host compression, so
a DDS4 drive should do 50Gb of typical business data without any
problem.

Mike.

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