The problem I have is that the machine is not physically accessable by
myself or the client, as it will be located in a rack somewhere in the
US.
The client has specified they want off-site backup. I dislike tape
backups with a passion, and even if I use this option, I will have to
pay someone to do the tape exchange and storage service.
-Colin
John Ferlito wrote:
>
> 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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