SDSC is considering backing up our AFS data into our NSL UniTree
archival storage system*. Since UniTree manages a large number of
tapes already, this may be preferable to having another set of tapes
for the operators to manage using the Transarc backup system.
This may be doable via a script that would run 'vos dump', sometimes
as a partial (incremental), and then store each volume file into
UniTree (creating UniTree directories based on the date). This could
probably be a cron job that would run automatically at night.
Does anyone out there run a similar AFS backup system? Anyone have a
script like this that they could share?
Eventually we may run PSC's MultiResident AFS which migrates
individual files to archival storage systems like UniTree. These
copies would serve as backup too. But we aren't currently running it.
We've been playing some with AFS for a while now but have not used it
much until recently. We are now in the process of making it a bigger
part of our infrastructure.
Thanks much,
Wayne Schroeder
San Diego Supercomputer Center
*Supercomputer centers often run archival storage systems as support
systems for the Crays, Paragons, etc. They are designed to manage a
moderately large number of preferably large-ish files that are
accessed infrequently. Users store the results of their production
runs into the archive for later access. Our archival storage system
is currently NSL UniTree running on an RS6000 with 150 GB of RAID
disk, and two STK tape silos (with 'robot' arms to move tapes in and
out of the tape drives). It currently contains 8 TB of data in 1.45
million files on 38,000 3480 tapes and 4,000 3490 tapes. Each silo
contains 6,000 tapes. The other tapes are stored in racks and are
retrieved manually by operators.
