David Irvine wrote:
Most of us keep some form of backups but its not exactly rock solid, TheFor the systems I look after, we do tape backups of either the full system or divided up between standard programs / operating system and data. I've never really liked the idea of rolling forward incremental backups manually. It's mostly database files that we're backing up so keeping the system coherent is very important. Another superstition I have is not using esotirc backup software. I don't doubt that there are great performance benefits, particularly when restoring selected small files, using Vertias (say) rather than tar, but my main concern with backups is how quickly I can get a system up and running after a major failure. I don't want to be running around tracking down software (and agents) in that situation.
majority of the data is backed up once a month (data doesnt change much
and its not critical data, just off site backups of customers set-ups.) The problem is the smaller data which resides in users home directories
or on laptops etc, which ironically is the critical data, not very large
amounts, but it changes a lot, and is deemed very important both to
company and to users.
What backup stratagies are people using? And what pitfalls/benefits do
they have?
When I get round to it, I'm going to put in gigabyte ethernet and dump the stuff to disk nightly but still take weekly offsite tapes. Most likely it'll be a box with Linux and as many IDE drives as I can fit in. (OK, so 100baseT is about the same speed as DDS4...but I'd rather just implement an improved solution from day1).
I have set a script on most of the laptops that allows users to do aMirroring. There's lots of tools of synchronizing with remote systems. I wrote one of them - called PushSite - which includes a list of some of the other programs available. (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/colin.mckinnon/colin/programs/myprogs/pushsite/). PushSite is quite stable/reliable now, although it doesn't send hidden files and doesn't like filenames with spaces in. Rsync is good for very large files which don't change much (e.g. database files).
full backup of their system (using tar) if they like, but this isnt very
economical on space or bandwidth.
HTH
Colin
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