Both of my replies are below.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Hill [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 9:38 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cc: Gregory Leblanc; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Disk v. Tape Backup -- Re: root on RAID
>
>
> I know this is off-topic, but since it was brought up ;)
>
> Why not use an old disk, outside of the RAID, for backups? I mount old
> IDE drives for backups only: tarring the entire system to the backup
> drive once a week, changed files daily. Seems to work better
> for me than
> tapes which always had problems, but maybe I had a poor tape system.
> When I've had to re-install the OS on test machines because I bungled
> something, it seems to work well and quickly. But maybe I'm missing
> something?
Off-site storage. If you're only backing up to that hard drive, you can't
ship it offsite very well. One good way (IMHO) to use a hard drive for
backup is to get one that's really fast, and do your backup to that from
your online data. This allows you to have minimal downtime for backing up
things like datbases. Once it's on the "backup" hard drive, bring
everything back online, and go to tape from that "backup" hard drive.
>
> Jeff
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >
> > Use tape! Raid shouldn't replace tapes, they serve different (but
> > sometimes similar) purposes.
First, tape bites. It's slow, and sequential. Recovering the server
intact, even if it takes a couple of hours, is much better than rebuilding a
small config on the server and waiting for everything to get restored.
Backups are never current, and restoring is a pain. That said, I keep
backups for at least a week on all the servers here. I've never had an
un-planned need to restore an entire system from tape. Usually the restores
that I do are because Joe User deleted his all important spreadsheet, and
NEEDS to have it back. I definately agree that RAID shouldn't (and can't)
replace tapes. I use RAID to protect my systems, and tapes to protect the
data that's housed on those systems. I don't consider my OS as data, but
the config files are definately data (overwriting smb.conf is not good...).
Greg
> >
> > Phil
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 01:38:11PM -0800, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Are you talking about going from RAID to non-RAID?
> > >
> > > Actually, I'm talking about OS failures, not disk
> failures. RAID protects
> > > against disk railures, thus redundant array of disks, but
> doesn't do jack
> > > for when the OS goes to hell. For production servers
> (where I work, at
> > > least), disk failures are about equal with OS failures.
> For test servers,
> > > 100% of my failures are when I screw up the OS.
