[Sussex] AMD Sempron Chips and BIG backups

[Alan Pope]

On 12/12/05, Ronan Chilvers <ronan at thelittledot.com> wrote:
> I'd be using Debian Sarge and the machine would be working as a file
> server with a few big drives in a software raid array.  The design

Heheh@ big drives. One mans "big" is another mans "tiny".

> department here is managing to generate increasingly frightening file
> sizes which is using up disk space at an alarming rate.  I was thinking
> of shelling out on some big SATA (or even IDE) drives and chaining them
> into a raid5 or maybe raid10 (don't know if software raid supports
> raid10 but I think it does).
>

Yeah, I've just bought 8 off 200GB SATA disks for home backups myself.
Will raid them as mirrored rather than RAID 5 though.

> Secondly, is anyone routinely backing up large amounts of disk
> space (as in 100GB+).

At home, no. At work, yes. We backup lots of systems, many TB per day.

> How are you doing it?

Most systems at work use non-linux-specific (AIX) IBM technology
called "flashcopy (tm)". We snapshot the filesystems and databases
from their fast (FAST-T or ESS disks) to another set of (sometimes
cheaper/slower SATA) disks. We either do this hot (with the systems
up) or cold (with them down) which takes a matter of a couple of
minutes to start. The users don't notice that bit if they are done
hot. Then for $(N) hours it sits in the background copying disk blocks
from the online disks to the backup disks. Later, when that's
finished, it gets backed up to tape.

This can be done under linux with LVM I believe. I have not tried it
myself but this link might be interesting to you.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshotintro.html

Cheers,
Al.