[Nottingham] Tape Backup Systems

[Martin]

Graeme Fowler wrote:
[---]
> 
> As an additional item, those of you doing regular backups: how often do
> you do regular restores, whether driven by necessity (lost data) or to
> test your systems? There are one or two NottsLUG parishioners who I know
> from a previous job who have been burned by tape failures...

I too have my own scripted solutions using (multiple) USB HDDs.

What's the current tape capacities, speed and cost before you need to
jump up to expensive auto-loaders and robots?


As a check, once a backup is written, the scripts read all the data back
to verify that both the source and destination disks agree on the data.
For extra paranoia, I use "cmp" for individual files for incremental
backups verify and (differently) "tar -d" for full.

That little trick has caught the occasional hardware glitch...

The script also does a fsck and full data verify over the weekends for
added thoroughness.

And always make sure that you keep at least 3 copies of your important
data and at different geographical locations...


Aside: I've used bash scripting primarily so that I fully understand for
myself EXACTLY what is happening, and also to ensure easy 'bare metal'
recovery. I should think that all Linux LiveCDs can run bash!

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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