Topic: backup recommendations please 6.0.1 - 7

[StuC]

I have been reading up on tape drives, rev drives, backup to hard disk etc.
This is not meant to be a "do my work for me" post but could people give me some idea what they consider the best route to backup a SME server (6.0.1 or soon to be 7.) I would like to avoid making too many changes to the standard SME because it just works and I need to be able to fix it 4am when I can't remember my own name.
Currently there are about thirty users and about 40G of project related files and archives (read junk).(email is held elsewhere)

The company had a historical distrust of tape so I have been backing up to hard drive(s) from a remote machine runing dantz. I now need to include everything not just visible shares and tape is now "permisable"

Thanks for any advice

Stu

[osiris9510]

I have mine backing up to an external USB hard drive.
just mount it and use cron....but ..er..im trying to get cron to work.

for now ive just made some backup scripts.

[StuC]

Did think about that sort of fix but would want to keep a few drives so that if one went down or the server was in a fire I had backup away from the area, at least with tape or another removable I can swap quickly then put them in a safe.

At the moment I backup to external drives and take off site, (the externals are on a windows box)

I have limited experience of command line Linux and want to put in place a well known solution I can justify to the IT dept from the parent company. They would just throw many grand at MS/Dell but arent going to fund it, I'd prefer to pay for open source and keep running what has been a brilliant OS for our uses.

Thanks for the reply

[osiris9510]

What I did from the get-go was created three backups of the server configuration files using the "backup to desktop" utility in server manager (This was before any users saved any data).  To test it I simulated a complete drive failure. I took out the existing hard drive and got another hard drive. I then installed SME to the new drive, restored configuration from the desktop and then restored a few "test" data files for a few users from the external USB hard drives. All permissions were retained and it was just plain sweet. The likelyhood of the users drive, the primary SME drive and the external drive crashing all at once are astronomical at best.  BTW, I did not tarball the data on the USB external drive.  Also, I installed a program on my windows box that can read ext3 filesystems *just in case* I have to get to the external drive directly.

If I had more hardware to play with I'd use a script, tar and FTP to do a backup between servers but Im kind of limited at the moment.

[StuC]

That does sound like a interesting take on the backup theme.
Our new AUP states that nothing can be stored on the local machine so the only data is on the server hard drive. I didnt dream up the policy and it's aimed at a centraly adminstered MS server.

When you say restored some files do you mean copied them back to the main drive?
I once got the task of "restoring" a NT4 server from part bad backups, restore can mean anything from copy to import foreign media, check integrity, identify valid files then loose days searching for the most recent non-corrupt file from some old tapes.

I had one USB drive go bad already (and another of the same maxtor drives die elswhere), I'd prefer not to temp fate. Its also the fire/theft thing if its all in one place.....
Still I'll have to give your idea a go but maybe on a home test box to start.

[osiris9510]

Ah well Im pretty limited as far as hardware goes, but you could set up another server and use ftp to copy the data contents from server1 to server2. ftp is pretty insecure so be sure to check the hosts.allow and hosts.deny files. You can set it up to only allow connections from specific IP addresses and deny any access from all others. But um, ftp doesnt encrypt passwords, so watch out for that too. If its a completely private network then FTP will be fine.

As far as "some files", what I meant was I did back up some MS word documents and jpgs for several users to the external drive just to have some "test" data to restore. When I did restore those files onto a fresh install of SME, the permissions were retained. That is, john smiths files went back into his home directory and only john smith can see/change those files. This data "restore" was only using the cp command from the mounted external drive, thats all. Keep in mind that in order for this to work I had to restore the server configuration files to the fresh install (See Restore from desktop).