-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Honestly, I've been ignoring this thread and wished to stay out of it, but from where i stand, Andre's words mostly correct. Backup are "backups", but what matter most for some companies specially those who are sanctioned by the Sarbanes-Oxley act (SOX) is hardcore archiving, not just for server configs but for every file that has a significant importance to the company in terms of loss and profitability.
"Does your IT department has a solution which can archive a single file which is being updated everyday, and yet can provide copy(copies) of that file whenever it is needed?" If yes, then most probably, there is a tape backup/archive in your solution equation, if not, how did/can you manage to store terabytes and terabytes and data which also comply to your disaster recovery policy? I honestly wanted to know. Maybe we can safely say that a backup/archive solution depends on the requirements and policies of an organization. But if you want your backup/archive solution to grow with the company, tape library/drives are as essential as they can be. And going to back to the OP, this is a good read, maybe you can get some idea from it. http://ftimes.sourceforge.net/Files/Recipes/ftimes-map-verify-backup.txt hth, Kenneth andrelst wrote: > On 8/1/07, ian sison (mailing list) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Again, my tirade against tape drives. >> >> DO NOT USE TAPE MEDIA FOR IMPORTANT BACKUPS! > > You don't need to shout. That is a very bold statement. For which? > small/medium/large companies? > > small: I might say yes. A long shot. > medium/large company: If you are the backup admin., i'll fire you. > > Have seen 6TB of weekly full data every week. You want to stick 10 > (500Gb HDD) new drives every week? > > Note too that if you are working for a US company, SOX compliance > dictates that you have to have a backup data retention for 7 years. > Where do you want to store 336 Drives? > And calculations does not include incrementals and yearly growth of data. > > If not tape, what then? If you want to restore, which hundreds of disks? > > Have worked with 1 medium size and 3 Large government/companies. > They entrust their important data to tape media. Care to give an alternative? > > Currently, there is no alternative. I hope in the future but none yet > as of the moment. > >> With tape media you will never know if your backups are indeed >> reliable when the time comes and you need to restore from them. >> Tropical climate makes the tape media vulnerable to fungus, so unless >> you store your tapes in a climate controlled room.... >> >> What to use instead: >> >> Hard disks are cheap. You can get 500Gb SATA/IDE drives and bind them >> with Linux SW RAID 5 or RAID 6. This gives you a cheap redundant >> network backup server which you can easily rebuild if one or two >> drives fail. The nice thing about hard disk drives is that when one >> fails, you will know - syslog will tell you, or in the case of SMART >> enabled drives, it will report failures way before the actual drive >> will die, giving you time to replace it. > > raid is not backup! Have said this 3 years ago, i'm going to say it > again. Raid is not backup, it was specifically designed to protect > data from hardware failures... not backups. > > This is what you do, go to the wikipedia on raid: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID > > press ctrl-f on firefox. search for backup. did you find any? "phrase > not found?" > > What you are doing above is replicating data AKA as DR (Disaster > Recovery) Strategy. You are confusing this with backup. > > To my analogy again 3 years ago... > > real backup is when you say, restore /etc/hosts and /etc/shadow at > June 3, 1999 because of a Court Order/Warrant from Grissom. > > Can your "redundant network backup server" using raid do that? No. > >> Also, with disk based media, you have the opportunity to use >> intelligent backup software like rsnapshot/rsync instead of just blind >> dumping of a tar.gz. > > Have said this few days ago, rsync/rsnapshot or tar won't help you > with backups especially with open files. Good luck backing up Live > Oracle with rsync or tar. > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32) iD8DBQFGsWJQ0jPsukh8Q9MRAsbRAJ9UzBB45b9b54/wbPA02pvib8TPFQCgm9Wc pZgTcXuti7oUdwkssfI5W74= =/uJW -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
