On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Stephen Frazier <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thank you. I will look at bacula. It seems like a possibility from the > first page of their website. > > Anybody got another suggestion? We did something similar as your initial suggestion. A (small) mini disk for each server that it can use as a safety box. The system admin would typically create a tar file with all his valuable stuff and put it there. A little shell script would link the disk, mount it, run the tar command, unmount and detach again. The fact that you have the tar file on another disk is your first safety, the other one was that this disk was backed up frequently. When something bad happens, you'd get a new virtual machine according to specifications plus the copy of your last safety box. So we did not need to do any other Linux file level backup. This was practical because the shop did have facilities to do mini disk backups (even physical backup). The reason to do it on mini disk rather than remote NFS server is that this also works without a network connection. It's fairly easy to take it to a higher level and have the system admin just specify the list of directories that should go in the safety box, and avoid everyone write his own shell scripts with the tar commands. It also implies that you automatically unpack the last tar file on a freshly brewed penguin when you recover it... We also started with "helper packages" that would be installed together with application software. Such a package would also ship a file that has the list of things to backup when you run that application. Rob ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
