Topic: I need a good backup strategy

[Arne]

Discovered one rather not so pleasant side with the dd complete HD copy alternative, I think.

If you are using a blank HD this seems to work ok.

But on the other hand, when I had the orginal HD and the Copy in the PC at the same time when booting, the sme 6.0 got totally confuced over this set of two identical hd so it crahed the file system on the main disk.

But anyhow .. I had just made myself a copy ..

So it seems like you have to use a blank disk for the copy if it should be there during the boot up prosess, or possibly something like a hot plugin divice like USB 2 ??? (Don't know, have never tried.)

[ken]

Optical by itself could be a problem as files become read only but when coupled with RAR zipping it is no longer a problem as the files get the original permissions back when extracted from the archive. Optical provides 4.5 gig DVD RW capabilities now for about $150.00 with zipped files thats probably 9 gig for a DVDRW that costs about $3.00 . You can splurge and by 1 for every day of week plus mid month and end month.

We actually had our server stolen last summer though with password protection we assume they got the box but not the data.

We backed up nightly to even and odd backups on a workstation which created several 650 meg files all zipped in rar format. which we copied to CDR's next day.

The older workstation was not stolen so we only had to do a restore to another computer and it did not take long at all using winrar and it automatically put everything back to the original locations with correct permissions. I was on holiday 3000 miles away at the time so I was very relieved the restore went so smoothly.

BackuptoWS available in the contribs section can automate the copying to the workstation drive.  What more can you ask for?

[Del]

Hi All,
This what I do, I have a HDD caddy on a XP machine + 2 caddy trays both with 80gig HDD's, I set up backup2ws to back up the XP machine (sharing the HDD in the caddy tray) at 10.00pm every night. I then swap the caddies over each morning so i am only ever 1 day behind. I have installed a free program on XP called slawdog tht enables me to set a shutdown time for the XP machine. You just have to work out how long the backup takes (and add a bit) to arrive at a time for the shutdown to take place. Never had any problems yet. I only backup data though as I figure SME is so easy to install I just reinstall it fresh if I need to.
slawdog can be found here: http://www.slawdog.com/
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Del

[%sig%]

[Boris]

>We actually had our server stolen last summer though with password protection we assume they got the box but not the data.

Unless you use encryption for the filesystem, data is easy retrivable by booting this server in the single mode or from the bootable linux CD (like knoppix or any other)
I would assume that if they were interested in data, they've got it. The only hope is they were after the hardware itself.

[Arne]

I'm really not an expert on theese backup things, but from reading these treads and also some other places on the net I have found out a little.

I have found two ways of backing things on command line level that works. It's the dd command, but this is a rather low levlel tool that consumes quide a lot of resourses but that exept for that works ok.

The other way that seems to be working really good is the rsync command. This is really a fantastic thing that first just compares to file set or directories and the makes a backup based on the difference between the file sets. In this way you might have a full backup of the datas, while really only writing in the changes from last backup. When I tested rsync it was running just very gently in the backgrund while it did the job. (Prossessor load dd ca 20 % making a complete digital copy, prosessorload rsync 1-2 % while making a incremental update of a full copy.)

This howto mention only backup to disk but it can actually backut to different media, I think:

http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs/dmay/mitel/howto/rsync-backup-howto.html

[M Alden]

We use a strategy very similar to the one suggested by Del, on three different sites, and have had great success.  As he said, it's a no-brainer.  Took a few minutes to figure out backup2ws, but that was about it.  Then, the drive can be taken off site and secured.

IMO,

M Alden

[Roger]

Install RAID 5 storage system.

Use 2 or more USB or Firewire external HDDS and rotate.

Use rsync http://rsync.samba.org/ to sychronise from RAID to USB/Firewire.

The Firewire/USB external HDD solution provides fast+cheap+reliable true "hot swap" backup with 24x7 server up-time and even "raw metal" recovery in event of catastrophic server failure if you get clever with the external HDDs

R.

[Greg Allt]

While this link doesn't take you to an e-smith specific article, the principles discussed are very good.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Backup-INTRO/

IHMO It is well worth the read

Greg

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