OT: Backup Solutions

[Boaz Bezborodko]

Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:47:55 -0400
From: "Jean-Pierre A. Radley" <appl at jpr.com>
Subject: Re: OT: Backup Solutions
To: FilePro Mailing List <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Message-ID: <20090826224755.GA27237 at jpradley.jpr.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Boaz Bezborodko propounded (on Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 03:31:37PM -0400):

| > From: Bill McEachran <wj_mceachran at yahoo.com>
| >
| > I'm looking for advice on backup solutions for multiple servers.
| >
| > We've got a couple of database servers, a web server, a mail server,
| > a 'other communications' server, a server which handles Oracle
| > reporting, and one dedicated to Terminal Services.
| >
| > In my opinion, all of them are inadequately backed up.
| >
| > I'm looking for a solution that will: - Allow them all to backup
| > to one device and hit tape or some other media. IOW, something
| > manageable  :-)  .
| >
| >
| > Any suggestions of hardware or software appreciated.
| >
| > TIA,
| >
| > -- Bill McEachran
|
| I set up a system to backup our small system from my home so that the
| backup is offsite.  This may be a bit low-end for your application,
| but the hardware was very cheap, the location is offsite, and it gives
| me an easy way to get older data.
|
| In this case I use a hacked version of D-Link's 2-drive NAS DNS-321
| device.  I run Rsnapshot (http://rsnapshot.org/) on it so that I have
| daily backups for the last week, weekly backups for the last month,
| and monthly backups going back 3 months.  (You can get information on
| hacking the device by googling "funplug" and keep in mind that the
| DNS-321 is simply a DNS-323 without a USB connector.)  It calls the
| work server and pulls off all the changes (using RSYNC) onto it's
| drive.
|
| You can also back up the multiple servers onto separate directories on
| the drive.
|
| I used to use BackupEdge, but restoring a file from tape was a real
| bear and quite time consuming.  Now I simply FTP to my backup device
| and pull out whichever version of the file I need.
|
| The box is also set up to back up it's data to the other drive in the
| device.
|
| If the D-Link device is too low end, you can easily build up something
| else like it from any unix white box.

Can you restore the entire OS if need be, like you can with BackupEdge?
Is BackupEdge using ftp noticably slower than your use of ftp?

-- JP

No.  But for my application I don't really need it as the system is not 
mission critical.  I have a few hours to build a new box and set up the 
filesystem before downloading the data.

But I still have BackupEdge and can save just the system files and setup 
to DVD-RW and restore from there if I want to. 

I tried using BackupEdge over FTP, but it needed to backup the entire 
file for any file that changed which made the backups a very long 
process.  With Rsnapshot's use of rsync the system only sends over the 
changes to the files.  I set up the system to e-mail me a report every 
night of what gets sent over.  From there I can tell that only about 100 
to 150MB is sent over each night for about 10GB worth of files that get 
changed each day.  So that is about 1% of the data that BackupEdge would 
have to send over to complete a backup.  It takes about an hour to do a 
backup which includes not only sending the 100-150MB, but also to go 
completely go through all 120GB in the directories to find what needs to 
be backed up and what not. 

Rsnapshot only creates a new version of a file when that file is changed 
so the data storage is also very efficient.  If a file doesn't change 
then Rsnapshot only creates a link to the existing file.  A full backup 
will have about 110GB of data, but only about 10GB is changed so 
Rsnapshot only has to store an additional 10GB for each instance of a 
backup.  With 5-daily, 4-weekly and 3 monthly backups that's 
110GB+10*12=230GB of storage.

BTW, Rsnapshot allows you to set up multiple backup runs for separate 
directories so you can use it with a controlled process that would shut 
down specific applications for the short period of time it would take 
Rsnapshot to rsync it before you start it up again.

My server is the only version of that hardware that I have so if I have 
a major hardware problem I'd have to build a new server anyway.  It's an 
old HP/Compaq Proliant server with massive amounts of redundancy that 
hasn't yet given a problem that caused me to have to rebuild it.  (Dual 
power supplies.  Dual SCSI array interface--I once had one half of the 
array crap-out after one of the drives went bad, but since I had set it 
up with one half of the mirrored array on one interface and the other 
half on the other no users noticed any interruption.  I simply pulled 
out the drives and pushed them back in and let the system do an 
automatic rebuild.)