On Mon, Sep 18, 2000 at 03:38:51PM +1100, Colin Humphreys wrote:
> Dows anyone know of a company offerring remote backup over the net, that
> will work in an automated style with linux? (i.e. the backups happen
> without user intervention)
There is no doubt someone that will do this for you. but do you
really need to. My experience in backing up has been the following. By
the way I'm assuming that the data isn't extremely mission critical. ie
you lose the data and someone dies or else someone looses a couple of
million.
Every night you make two backups one is to tape the other is to
a harddisk on another box. Reasons for this are mostly you're backing
up because soeone accidently deletes something. So if you have the back
up on disk you can get it back fairly quickly. This is like you're hot
backup.
The tape gets taken home by someone that night. This is you're oh my god
the building blew up backup. That person should have brought last weeks
tape from home to put in the drive. Make the cronjob keep emailing the
person till they've changed the tape to make sure it gets done and have
backup procedures in place in case they're sick.
Alternatively only one tape a week actually gets taken home. ie say you
have a months worth of tapes and you take a tape home every tuesday. So
the last 4 weeks are both onsite and offsite. I would also recommend
that once a week, banking day is the easiest. That the tape from that
day goes to the bank and gets put in a safety deposit box. Thats the oh
my god the building blew up and the guy taking the tapes home has been
storing them ontop of magnets :)
The question is do you really want your data going off site too
someone you don't know and are probably paying a lot of money to for the
privelige. I know that for most situations the above really isn't enogh
because it's really mission critical and paying for real offsite doesn't
matter but for alot of case the above is more than sufficient.
Also a quick tip for those that haven't been hurt by real
badluck. Religiouly with out failur make sure you do the following once
a month.
1. Pick a random tape from your backup set.
2. Pick a random file on the tape. If you backup multiple machines to the tape choose
one from each machine
3. Try and recover that file.
Once every 4 months do the above in someone elses tape drive.
Trust me, spending 3 days without sleep trying to recreate 2
months worth of data from other means because the ssh keys automating
your backup got changed isn't fun :)
--
John
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