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

[mbryson]

What have you got, how's it working and how do you like it? I checked out a commercial solution and I'm not even going to propose it. It's $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

I was thinking I could build some kind of Linux box here at my house and backup my work's files to it. Anybody done anything like that? Linux flavor with a storage web interface?

 

[waynehartwig]

What have you got, how's it working and how do you like it? I checked out a commercial solution and I'm not even going to propose it. It's $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

I was thinking I could build some kind of Linux box here at my house and backup my work's files to it. Anybody done anything like that? Linux flavor with a storage web interface?

Ever consider a Snap drive instead of puting together a linux box?

 

[Caleb]

how much space are you talking? You gotta remember that tranferring it to your house is going to be SLOWWWWWW, especially if it's a lot of data. Otherwise thats a very viable option. You could easily setup your scripts to run your backup transfers during the wee hours of the night.

 

[Caleb]

instead of doing a full on server you could just do a network attached external storage device (like a Snap drive like Wayne mentioned...however they are quite spendy). The thing thats nice about doing a sloution like this is you can still access it like a server (via SSH or whatever) but you don't have ot worry about keeping an entire OS happy and healthy just for storage, if you have other plans for it as well then thats different.

 

[Herzog]

Why not save that money and time...

Create an on-site backup on portable media, and take it home with you. Rotate the media, taking a new on home with you and bring the old back once a week or more.

 

[Caleb]

Why not save that money and time...

Create an on-site backup on portable media, and take it home with you. Rotate the media, taking a new on home with you and bring the old back once a week or more.

well, a true off-site backup should never be on-site unless it's brought on for "that" emergency. Having it on-site makes it just as vulnerable as all your other back-ups to any kind of disaster.

 

[mbryson]

how much space are you talking? You gotta remember that tranferring it to your house is going to be SLOWWWWWW, especially if it's a lot of data. Otherwise thats a very viable option. You could easily setup your scripts to run your backup transfers during the wee hours of the night.

Ding, Ding, Ding.......

I want an offsite storage backup solution. I hate tapes and always have. However, I don't know of a better, semi-economical solution other than something like this. I have the ultra gay Comcast 6 mb (that I'll never even use even if I do something like this) connection (I'd just like some decent pricing for what I use--$50 is too much, IMHO for an internet connection) that I wouldn't mind taking advantage of.

I thought I'd build the server at work, transfer all of our files over the network, bring the server home and download the changed files to a new directory (basicly creating an offsite backup solution).

I'd imagine we could have a max of 5 gig per night (changes) downloaded to the server.

I've got an old server I could use to set it up and see if I can get things working. If it works, I can spend some $$$ on whatever and even do our archive on the offsite server

Issues I see:

Which Linux distro would be best/secure/etc.? (I'm not a Linux geek, but I'll sleep at a Holiday Inn Express the night before I build it.)

Any web based Linux storage solutions out there? Pros/Cons of any.....

 

[mbryson]

Why not save that money and time...

Create an on-site backup on portable media, and take it home with you. Rotate the media, taking a new on home with you and bring the old back once a week or more.

Any Tera-byte portable media? (I have about 400 gig of active files between the e-mail server, server configuration and file storage) Up to 5 gig per day of new files to backup (that'd be a HUGE day, but I should probably plan for that).

 

[Caleb]

check out LaCie Bigger Extreme Disks, they have up to 2TB of storage available. They have a triple interface (USB, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800) but not sure if they have a NAS option.

 

[Caleb]

Ding, Ding, Ding.......

I want an offsite storage backup solution. I hate tapes and always have. However, I don't know of a better, semi-economical solution other than something like this. I have the ultra gay Comcast 6 mb (that I'll never even use even if I do something like this) connection (I'd just like some decent pricing for what I use--$50 is too much, IMHO for an internet connection) that I wouldn't mind taking advantage of.

I thought I'd build the server at work, transfer all of our files over the network, bring the server home and download the changed files to a new directory (basicly creating an offsite backup solution).

I'd imagine we could have a max of 5 gig per night (changes) downloaded to the server.

I've got an old server I could use to set it up and see if I can get things working. If it works, I can spend some $$$ on whatever and even do our archive on the offsite server

Issues I see:

Which Linux distro would be best/secure/etc.? (I'm not a Linux geek, but I'll sleep at a Holiday Inn Express the night before I build it.)

Any web based Linux storage solutions out there? Pros/Cons of any.....

with Rsync you could do incremental backups piece of cake and best of all its all command line and can easily be added as cron job so you'd never have to even look twice at it.

 

[Herzog]

Any Tera-byte portable media? (I have about 400 gig of active files between the e-mail server, server configuration and file storage) Up to 5 gig per day of new files to backup (that'd be a HUGE day, but I should probably plan for that).

Ouch. Large storage is definately needed for backups, but I'd hate to have to push that much data over the net to an offsite location.

Then you have to consider wether or not your backups will get corrupt pushing that much out, and if you are doing this securely (compressed encryption or other secure transfer)

 

[mbryson]

Ouch. Large storage is definately needed for backups, but I'd hate to have to push that much data over the net to an offsite location.

Then you have to consider wether or not your backups will get corrupt pushing that much out, and if you are doing this securely (compressed encryption or other secure transfer)

Yeah.....there's a lot of issues. I just wanted to see what people were doing (if anything). There's some commercially available solutions that work similarly but they ain't cheap.

 

[Brad]

I do offsite to an EMC Clarion SAN in SLC over a DS3. Pricey, but federal regulations require it.

 

[Rusted]

5 new gigs per day? or 5 gigs once a week with nightly incrementals? If you can do incrementals the nightly transfers could be much smaller, so that may not be an issue.

 

[mbryson]

5 new gigs per day? or 5 gigs once a week with nightly incrementals? If you can do incrementals the nightly transfers could be much smaller, so that may not be an issue.

Up to 5 gig per day. Our Mac users tend to save their projects on their desktop machines until they're almost done with them and then save them out to the network. They're aware of the risk............and haven't changed their behavior. Nobody's really lost a Mac hard disk yet, but it'll happen sometime. I'd say that'll happen once a week on average, but could be more depending on the corporate workload. Mostly I'd only be backing up new e-mail and probably less than 1 gig per night.


I'm kinda thinking about doing a 'hybrid' type of thing with the removeable drive. If there's a lot to back up, it'll just back up to the removeable drive and I'll take that home with me the day I come in and do a FireWire (or ?) transfer to the server at home (maybe even a DVD? Just thinking out loud.). It'd take a little batch file relearning, but it doesn't seem like it could be too hard to do. Under 'normal' circumstances, I'd just have it back up to the offsite via FTP or ??? {An everyday type of FTP server with a grundle of storage space would serve my needs pretty well, I'm thinking.}

 

[Rusted]

I do some backups with the external drives. I get tired of swapping them weekly, having to do that daily would first be a pain, and second be forgotten. If you can avoid the task of taking home media every day avoid it.

I would probably go for the FTP solution as well. It can happen automatically, and can just happen without you having to remember to do something every day

Also look at a program called "robocopy" that comes on the windows resources kit. It is used to mirror or copy directories, I currently use it to mirror something similar to what you are doing, and it has worked flawless. It is much more powerful that a FTP batch file because you can do two way replication / synchronization, or one way, or just a report, and all of it can be logged as well.

Why the hatred for tape backups? Look at Dell for the DLT backup systems.

 

[mbryson]

I do some backups with the external drives. I get tired of swapping them weekly, having to do that daily would first be a pain, and second be forgotten. If you can avoid the task of taking home media every day avoid it.

I would probably go for the FTP solution as well. It can happen automatically, and can just happen without you having to remember to do something every day

Also look at a program called "robocopy" that comes on the windows resources kit. It is used to mirror or copy directories, I currently use it to mirror something similar to what you are doing, and it has worked flawless. It is much more powerful that a FTP batch file because you can do two way replication / synchronization, or one way, or just a report, and all of it can be logged as well.

Why the hatred for tape backups? Look at Dell for the DLT backup systems.

Tape backups: They're just a necessary evil. They work well, though. I've just had trouble when I don't rotate my media like I should. I've started using a sharpie (there's high tech for you) to indicate purchase date and that seems to work OK. It's no fault of the tapes, it's just not a 'solid' media. I'd trust a RAID array a LOT more, .

 

[Meat_]

Build the server at home, use a USB2 or Firewire external enclosure for the daily's, you can transfer 5GB in less than 5min.

 

[RUYellow]

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.

 

[Rusted]

...the ability to restore for last month, week, yesterday.
....

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.