[Cialug] suggestions on HDD based backup

[Josh More]

 And right here is the point of concern:

"Explaining it now, it now seems like overkill to take the nightly backup off site since there will be a remote mirror of the data, but I'd rather be over-prepared than under-prepared."

Yes, it is better to be over-prepared than under-prepared.  However, by requiring the off-site component to be a movable hard drive, you are drastically limiting your options.  If you split up the requirements:

1) Ability to restore to "point in time" where POT is a nightly backup stored for two weeks.
2) Ability to store backup sets offsite

You can put in a backup server or NAS that stores multiple backup sets and then mirror these sets off site.  If you like, you can also mirror these to a USB/SATA drive and pull that offsite occasionally... but the former alone would meet the criteria.

It is worth noting that NO backup solution will be admin-free.  You cannot rely on the system to notify you in case of failure, as a failure could also fail to send the notifications.  The NAS issue mentioned earlier in this thread would have been resolved if someone had checked for success on a daily basis.  Most other mirroring / backup set issues can be caught by spending 5m a day making sure it's working OK.

-Josh More, CISSP, GIAC-GSLC, GIAC-GCIH, RHCE, NCLP
morej at alliancetechnologies.net<mailto:morej at alliancetechnologies.net>
515-245-7701
________________________________
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [cialug-bounces at cialug.org] on behalf of Tim Champion [timchampion at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2010 13:25
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [Cialug] suggestions on HDD based backup

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 12:52 PM, Eric Junker <eric at eric.nu<mailto:eric at eric.nu>> wrote:
On 4/15/2010 11:27 AM, Tim Champion wrote:
> We are planning on going to a hard drive based backup system at work. We
> are a non-profit on a tight budget (I can spend about $1500 on this
> total), so a enterprise level disk-to-disk system isn't feasible. The

How many computers are you backing up? How much storage space do you need?

If you want something that works right out of the box I would suggest
something like the Drobo FS http://www.drobo.com/ You do pay a premium
for the ease of use. Instead of swapping drives for off-site backup you
could use a network based backup like Mozy http://mstorageozy.com<http://mozy.com> or manually
backup to Amazon S3.

If you want more of a traditional NAS device, I've heard good things
about QNAP http://www.qnap.com/


I've looked into many of the online backup services. Our total backup need right now is about 500GB, so the online services like mozy start getting really expensive. Mozy charges 50 cents per GB per month, which would be $250 per month. So, that pretty much rules that out.

We are already planning to do a site-to-site data sync between Marshalltown & Ames, but that will be a live sync, and would not protect against accidental deletion. We've all heard the horror stories of places using mirroring or something like a live sync and then losing data anyway because they did not have a "real" backup. The piece I'm specifically looking at is the nightly backup so we have at least 2 weeks of history of our data. Explaining it now, it now seems like overkill to take the nightly backup off site since there will be a remote mirror of the data, but I'd rather be over-prepared than under-prepared.

Tim Champion
timchampion at gmail.com<mailto:timchampion at gmail.com>


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