Geek talk: Let's talk about off-site, backup servers

[mbryson]

Not to throw you completely off track, but are you planning on just syncronizing data, if so that does not give you the ability to restore for last month, week, yesterday.

I don't do Net Admin anymore, but I had many times that I had to restore a file that was changed a month before that.

RAID I love, but RAID does nothing for the stupid secretary that deletes the entire file she needs.

Just remember make an idiot proof system, and they will make a better idiot.

Sorta. It'll be stored as 'changed' for the week, full backup each week of 'new files', etc. We were looking at a cool Linux based system at the bank I worked at that was pretty batch driven. I'm trying to get the batch source files and modify them to fit my needs for this project. There'll be some issues, I'm sure as we were able to compress files pretty significantly due to the type of business. We do a lot of Adobe stuff here and I don't think that'll compress quite as well.

We started with a full backup of the existing server files.
Monday: Copied over any 'new' or modified files into a dated folder
Tuesday: Copied over any 'new' or modified files into a dated folder (including Monday's files)
Wednesday: Copied over any 'new' or modified files into a dated folder (including Monday and Tuesday's files)
Thursday: Copied over any 'new' or modified files into a dated folder (including Monday-Wednesday's files)
Friday: Copied over any 'new' or modified files into a dated folder (including Monday-Thursday's files)
Saturday: Copied over any 'new' or modified files into a dated folder (including Monday-Friday's files)


Sunday: Backup of all files (kinda redudant, but if you had some file corruption for whatever reason on Sat., you'd get a chance to get it again--or you could copy a corrupted file again ) into a dated folder.


2nd Monday: Copied over any 'new' or modified files into a dated folder
2nd Tuesday: Copied over any 'new' or modified files into a dated folder (including Monday's files)
2nd Wednesday: Copied over any 'new' or modified files into a dated folder (including Monday and Tuesday's files)
2nd Thursday: Copied over any 'new' or modified files into a dated folder (including Monday-Wednesday's files)
2nd Friday: Copied over any 'new' or modified files into a dated folder (including Monday-Thursday's files)
2nd Saturday: Copied over any 'new' or modified files into a dated folder (including Monday-Friday's files)


Basicly, what we ended up with was a rolling months worth of weekly backups and a rolling years worth of monthly backups on an FTP looking-browser interface server (wish I could remember what he was using). As admins (or I think you could grant rights to users ) you could find and restore files pretty quickly.

I'm kinda wanting to modify this to just do the 'changed' files for probably a month (a week would work fine, though), then do another 'FULL' backup via a physical transfer (firewire, USB or ???) where I haul a device home and plug it into the other server.


It's still kinda half baked, but where I'd like to go. I'm sure I'll end up with tapes again ($,$$$ cheaper than a solution like this), but wanted to see if anybody had tried something like this.

Brings up a good point, where tapes are very strong. you could easily own a year worth of tapes, and cycle through those for less money that setting up a spare machine, or multiple external hard drives. One tape per week, or one tape for every two weeks that sits on a shelf, and after a year you start cycling those back in. You could then go back in time up to a year to retrieve files. Very difficult and expensive to do that wtih the FTP or DVD or external drive options disussed.

I'm probably in a much better place with LTO format tapes than I am with my current DLT units (obviously ). I just want to step ahead of LTO if I can.


I'm checking out your 'robocopy' as soon as I get a spare minute (looks like they'll be kinda hard to come across this week). You just backing up to anther WinDoze server?

 

[Rusted]

.....
I'm checking out your 'robocopy' as soon as I get a spare minute (looks like they'll be kinda hard to come across this week). You just backing up to anther WinDoze server?

Technically not even a server back up, just a share on a remote server that gets replcated to either a share on a local computer or a second share. I run a batch file on a schedule, but here is what one of my call lines looks like

robocopy \\remoteserver\remoteShare\ \\localServer\localshare\ /PURGE /LOG+:c:\logfilewrittenHere.txt

We should label this as a "mirror" more than a "backup"

 

[my4thjeep]

At my current job we use a dedicated T1 for real time back up... Two HP Unix Boxes that synchro in real time. Cost $680K.

When I worked for a company with much shallower pockets we used a

Buffalo Technology TeraStation Home Server NAS 1.0TB

Very Portable... at around 15lbs

After our com room literally burned down... and we lost everything including our tapes we changed policies and bought this for server back ups.

 

[Caleb]

How much data are you passing over that T-1? You do realize T-1s are actually pretty slow??? (1.5Mb) If it's much data that's gotta be a pretty painful transfer :sick:

 

[my4thjeep]

Not much data just a constant 24x7 flow...

Its all call input its all just text records to a "scream in terror" a CTREE database. The smithsonian keeps calling and asking for it back.

 

[Caleb]

that makes sense then...

 

[78mitsu]

If you're using a linix box, most of them have a netcat function. or you could pass it through SSH, also, there are online storage places like nethero that offer teir one storage that you can use for backups. I highly recommend compressing and encrypting offsite backups if they aren't on a system that you directly control. Lets just say I've had issues with government agencies that have a basic respect for privacy. PM me, I can help I've done it for others.