I wrote:
>#I'd also recommend against backing up to a disk drive in the same server,
>#unless the hard disk happens to be of the removable kind (Zip, Jaz, etc.)
You replied:
>why? I'm still unsure what I'm gonna buy still waiting for that lto.org tape
>drives to come out 100GB native capacity.
Well it kind of defeats the purpose of having a backup if the backup
destination is on the same server. Ideally backup media should be separate
from the server (tape, CD-ROM, removable media of some kind) and taken
off-site. If the server has RAID that will help protect against disk
failure but what about if the server goes and takes all your disk drives
with it? (Power surge from a lightning strike.) What about equipment
theft or disaster recovery? (Fire, earthquake, etc.) Depending on the
"value" of your data, complete loss may be no big deal but I'd wager that's
not the case or you wouldn't be backing it up to begin with.
>But if I buy a snap server 4000 with
>120GB and with Raid5 84 GB available. Won't it take like 10 hours or so
>to do a
>full weekly backup if I shoot it across the LAN?
Backing up across a LAN works, but yes, it's generally a slow process. How
much data to you anticipate backing up? How much of it is user data and
how much is the operating system? I'm using an HP DAT40i (DDS-4) tape
drive here, which has 20Gb capacity (uncompressed). HP also makes an
autoloader version that holds 5 DDS-4 tapes and 1 cleaning cartridge, so
uncompressed capacity should be around 100Gb, more if you use software
compression (although it'll take longer, but likely not as long as across
the LAN). You should be able to use the 6th slot for an additional tape
instead of the cleaning cartridge, bringing capacity to 120Gb
uncompressed. I don't know for sure if the autoloader is compatible with
Linux, but I've found the folks at HP to be pretty helpful. The actual
tape drive itself should be ok, but I'd want to make sure tapes could be
loaded/unloaded automatically during a full backup *and* be able to switch
tapes at will for daily backups if desired (possibly as part of a shell
script scheduled by cron). Then again there's also DLT tape drives and
other large capacity drives.
You also mentioned a snap server - are you considering using that to
backup another server's data? If so you might consider something a little
less network intensive, like periodic data synchronization using rsync or
other utility. Yes, it'll be ugly the first time you run the sync, but
after that it'll go faster because only files that have changed will be
copied. I use rsync to keep a couple of CD-ROM databases updated between 2
servers and it works great. However this still leaves you with the backup
copy on-site.
>I'm still going crazy with backup software...but I think I might have found a
>winner....novastar has a linux backup software just came out May 8th and I
>found
>it easy to use and it worked pretty good. But still have a month or more to
>evaluate different backup software.
I'm not familiar with novastar. We've been using BRU ( http://www.bru.com
) here for a couple of years and I've been happy with it. Runs from the
CLI (which I use), has a GUI interface and is pretty easy to schedule a
backup job with cron.
-HTH
-Eric
Eric Sisler
Library Computer Technician
Westminster Public Library
Westminster, CO, USA
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Linux - don't fear the Penguin.
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