Hard disks, All the way. People ARE the #1 cause of data loss. I rsync
critical data (work product) to two places one a alternate server that
is local and the second copy is remote.
because I don't trust users, I have a "NO DELETE" policy in effect ,
here is the critical part of the script:
#!/bin/tcsh
setenv DATENAME `date +%m%d%y_%H%M`
rsync -avbl --partial --suffix=~$DATENAME <dirs to backup>
<usern...@remoteserver:/path>
I really like this because it won't overwrite files. you end up with
multiple versions of the files.
something.doc (current version)
something.doc~092010_1155 (version that was replaced by the current
version)
something.doc~081510_1155 (older version)
this policy has saved several crisis situations.
The backups do get cluttered with lots of previous versions, but mostly
it's stuff like documents which are small. (big files like video usualy
don't change) I have a purge script that will delete old versions of
large files (>50meg) where more than 3 versions exist. I only run this
script when I need space.. .. I havn't in a while. Hard drives are
cheap. it's was probably 6 months ago that I got my last set of 1.5 TB
drives for <$100 each.
All my server file systems are on LVM partitions, so adding the drives
and extending onto them is easy. Lately I have been trying to keep each
volume down to one or two physical drives. (I migrate off the older
drives ) . Users only experience minimal downtime as I swap drives, and
need unmount to run resize2fs I now consider any drive < 500Gig to be
junk. ( the cutoff used to be 100 )
Then only headache I havn't solved is if users MOVE files. it creates
redundant copies on the backups. In theory I could us the INODE data to
detect this. haven't been motivated enough to solve that.
I like the live drive solution much better than any backup solution I
know of ,because if the primary catastrophically fails, the backup copy
can literally just replace the primary server.
--Russell
On 9/30/2010 3:40 PM, Ron Guerin wrote:
Matthias Johnson wrote:
I know several people must be involved in backups so I thought I might
pose this question. What backup media do you / would you use for a
business? I know there has been some that have stopped using tape
media and now do backups to disk but is this a smart approach. To
quote the O'Reilly book PC Hardware in a Nutshell by Robert Bruce
Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson.
I can only speak for myself, but away from books, out in the real world,
tape and the people responsible for using them are the #1 cause of
backup failure. If disks were really as bad as they're trying to
suggest, nobody use them for _primary storage_, but we all do, don't we?
I started switching clients to disk backups about 5 years ago. They
have gone from highly unreliable backup systems based on tapes that
often verified but could not actually be read when needed, and people
that weren't changing their tapes, to a backup system that has been
there for them 100% of the time they need to recover something.
Please note however, that people are still the main point of failure.
Unless you automate offsite backup as well, you're still going to be
relying on people to rotate external drives on a schedule that meets the
needs of the situation at hand. During my financial industry days, you
could rely on people to handle backups correctly because it was often
their only job to do. In my small business days however, the task of
rotating drives seems only to get done if the owner/CEO/CFO or some
other top rung executive personally does it themselves, and getting to
the point where they'll do that usually requires discovering that even
threats to fire people will not get them to perform their backup duties
competently.
- Ron
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
Oct 6 - Creating Browser Extensions for Firefox and Chrome
Nov 3 - Open Source Hardware: Bugs, Beagles and Beyond
Dec 1 - IBM's Open Client Deployment
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
Oct 6 - Creating Browser Extensions for Firefox and Chrome
Nov 3 - Open Source Hardware: Bugs, Beagles and Beyond
Dec 1 - IBM's Open Client Deployment
