OT: disaster recovery

[D. Thomas Podnar]

: In a Red Hat Enterprise environment, what would be the best disaster 
: recovery configuration?  Money is no object.
: 
: Duplicate server?
: 
: Rsync?
: 
: Edge Backup and Recovery?
: 
: How can you reduce the size of the data loss window between backups or 
: rsync?
: 
: Will rsync work when users are updating records?
: 
: Is there a way  to make sure files are not corrupted?
: 
: I am looking for any good ideas?
: 
: Thanks,
: 
: Richard D. Williams
: The Applications Group

When it comes to short backup windows and disaster recovery under Linux
or SCO Unix operating systems, it is hard to beat the combination of
BackupEDGE / RecoverEDGE with FTP Backups.

Any server, device or appliance with and FTP server can be used as a
backup devices, and backups can be done as often as necessary, with
as many generations of backup as the storage device has disk space.

This functionality can supplement or replace traditional media-based
backups.

We use a comination of full system backups (nightly), differential
backups (lunchtime) and targeted filePro backups (as necessary and
before upgrades / major updates) to provide maximum protection and
data redundancy / increased granularity here at Microlite.

Yes, we're a filePro user. When you register our product, you are
doing it in a filePro app. When you get an invoice, it was created
in filePro.


The biggest thing to remember about filePro is that it is best to
back it up in a "Window" when not much is happening. While programs
like BackupEDGE can easily back up live files, it is not possible
to tell if a user is in the process of updating large numbers of
files and indexes while the backup is occurring. For instance, did
we back up the master file before the invoice was posted, but the
inventory file after the stock was decremented?

Care and planning is required when backing up large numbers of
open, related / semi-related files. It would be nice to have an
API from fptech to freeze things in a consistent state for backup.


There are lots of great products out there for backup and DR.
Unitrends DPU (also mentioned in this thread) is a good example
when large numbers of servers, including windows, is involved.

BackupEDGE provides a great deal of flexibility at an inexpensive
price point.


Tom
---
 D. Thomas Podnar
 tom at microlite.com         http://www.microlite.com
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 2315 Mill Street          724-375-6908 Fax
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