> On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Belkie, Dan wrote:
>
>> Hi Guys!
>>
>> I have a couple Mandrake boxes running on my network, and I would
>> like to know peoples opinions on the best way (also cost
>> effective) to do a backup. Now I know this depends on what the
>> uptime that I require is but......
>
> Hi Dan:
> Like Guy Van Sanden wrote, it depends entirely on your needs. If
> this box can't ever go down you'll need raid. On our network here
> we use a 10 slot tape robot with 30G capacity per slot. On my home
> network I get by with a single DLT for the daily backups and a CD
> burner for the non-critical but not easily replaceable stuff
> (MP3s, pictures, etc.).
>>
>> I have a firewall and another box that is a mail server (just
>> relays to another mail server) Would you guys suggest getting into
>> disk mirroring / RAID (does it work well?) if so what would the
>> config have to be? 4 disks? 2 for boot (and to mirror it) and 2
>> for data (and to mirror it)
>>
> There's a timely article on ARSTechnica about raid at
> (http://www.arstechnica.com). If your machines are mainly static
> (and it seems so since one's a firewall and the other just relays)
> and you don't mind some downtime, you can probably get away with
> keeping backups of the configurationsi, installation CD and any
> necessary updates. My firewall, running on a Mandrake 7.2 system,
> takes up about 350M for the entire system, so I just dd it across
> the network to
> another system.
>>
>> What about just tar cvf backup.tar ./
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Dan
Hi Dan and all,
what I've found entertaining at first and then quite useful and
productive was to write a simple bash script to take care of nightly
backups. this is initialized every night by a cronjob and then emails
me the particulars of the job when it's finished. If I had a tape
drive I could have it store the resulting .tgz files to a tape, but
since I don't have one that currently works I'm just shooting them to
a seperate partition set up just for backups.
This backup script takes good care of the important things like
/home/$user
$user/document_folder(s)
/etc #to get all the system config files in the event something
#terrible happens and I've got to reload and recover
/var/lib # cause there's lots O goodies in here. especially
# all the MySQL stuff.
/var/spool/mail/* # gotta have good backups of all the mail
# don't bother with the newsgroups stuff
# just keep the config file and download the
# messages later when system back up again.
/var/ftp/* # everything on the FTP server gets backed up
# every night. just to make sure... I'm a packrat.
/var/www/* # everything on the web server gets backed up as well.
and that about it does it.
Mark
--
Mark
"Stupidity has no moral high ground. It can't see that high!"
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Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
