Topic: Backup Solutions

[hturnage]

I would like some input as to what everyone uses for backups. I have been using travan 20 & 40 tape drives which sometimes work and are too small .  I have also used external backups with usb hard drives attached to other devices that typically don't work.  I need something simple that just works.  Any suggestions.

Hal

[jfarschman]

Hal,

  You should probably do a search on the bulletin board first.  People around here really like it if they know you made an effort before they spend time posting long winded replies.  About a week ago I posted a pretty long list of various solutions along with my opinions.

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=29256.msg121980#msg121980

  With that said... I use Backup to Workstation.

  Hope this helps.

[hturnage]

Thank you.  I had read that posting before.  Please let me rephrase my question.  Has anyone tried any other backup drives that have found to work well.  I don't want to backup thru the network if I don't have to.

hal

[rf131]

I looked at the tape drive option, but just couldn't justify spending all that money for storage equivalent to my current (and future) disk capacity.  If you look at using USB enclosures, you may find that you can get a whole lot of data backed up without investing in an expensive tape drive.  I'm going to use the rsnapshot contrib and have the user swap out the drive on a regular basis.

Since I don't have anything really special set up in SME, I'll just go the 12 minute boot and install from CD route, add my three contribs, five ibays, and 12 user accounts by hand if I have a complete system meltdown, then recover files from the USB disk.

Having said that, it may not be the best fit in your case.  My scenario is a 6.0.1 server with 2 80GB drives in RAID 1, server mode only, 12 users.  They can afford to be down for a day as well while I get them back up and running...

This is a not-for-profit organization that doesn't have a lot of money for IT (or paying me either).  I don't have it in production yet, but will be soon.  I'll be really glad to retire the 6 year old NT 4 server it is replacing.

Good luck.

[duncan]

I'm going to use the rsnapshot contrib and have the user swap out the drive on a regular basis.

Hi,

rsnapshot is heavily dependent on linking. Rotating hard drives will very likely break things.

[azche24]

hi,

I would like some input as to what everyone uses for backups. I have been using travan 20 & ...

that was pretty unprecise. SME-Users here run almost everything from 350 MH PII/256 MB Ram System with 9 GB SCSI drive to Dual CPU/4 GB Ram and 1 TB HW-Raid. So you may guess, what these folks use for backup: Everything from Floppy/CD to DLT-Drives.

If your compressed backups are below 9 GB or if you have the chance to select (Data, APPS, other files) and if you NOT want to do a cheap and effective backup over network, then use DVD/DL and write directly to it. There are ways to achieve that.

If your compressed backups are below 36 GB i would recommend DAT-Tapes of some kind. Buy them used at ebay or such. Buy new tapes at ebay. Good for weekly or even daily backups. Used that, until my files got over the 4 GB barrier with an old DAT2 Streamer (there were no cheap and excellent DVD-RAMs in those days).

If your backups are above that or have to be done daily and you still do not want to use simple and efficient network backup, then you have to invest about 150 EUR for a DLT-Drive at ebay and some 100 EUR for Media.

In every case the storage device has to be fixed into the server. I know my folks, they are lazy and nobody wants to connect portable USB-HDs daily or even weekly.

And the backup HAS to be somewhere else (other room, other house, other country).

Forget everything else or better build a nice little NAS from old PC and big HD using some linux-based NAS and use backup2ws or something like that to just copy your precious files over to another HD hourly, daily or weekly. I use this method alone now copying the pure data and configuration files without ibays (because my office-sme is backupserver also) to differen workstations in the same network. You are lucky with a Gigabit NIC in your server and the other WS - these NICs are cheap (use a common realtek model for the server, others are not recognzized easily by SME 6.0x) and see your backups fly!

And restores are extremely fast. You can restore e.g. the user's profile directories with 2 GB in 15 minutes via backup2ws if you know what to do.

Do a training on that! Complete restores are often unwanted.

Only the most average image-backup solutions like acronis beat that simple, fast and effective backups on linux.

The backup method may vary, but you have to do it.[/url]

[rf131]

Hmmm... the last couple of replies have gotten me to thinking a little more about my solution.

I'm curious about the potential "breakage" when using rsnapshot with an external USB device.  Can anybody explain this?

I have a W2K Pro workstation I could set up for a remote backup, then use the USB disks for off-site.

Thanks,
Kevin