Hello everyone...

Our site is backed up nightly on a remote NAS server but we have one Dell server in the office which holds development works and other key assets running Fedora.

What kind of back up do you think I should use?

Tape vs External Hard Disk vs Removable Hard Disk vs anything else?

Tape + removable hard drive. Backup your backup.

Yeah sounds good. Taps are quite low capacity though.

I think the solution is two external hard disks so one can be taken off site each night.

Extrnal disk (USB2 2 1/2") are pretty cheap and pocket sized now + remote FTP backup.
Reliable tape backup can get expensive, as it's best to use a 'grandfather, father,son' (daily, weekly, monthly) rota.

I agree about the grandfather, father,son rotations. Thanks Decker. I quite like the look of this:

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/in...duct_uid=108816

Looks ideal Al, pop it in your pocket and that's the snapshot safe (well reasonably safe anyway).
I'll try and remember what we used to use for NIX boxes, that ran a constant backup updating changing files to an external disk array - handy for when your leaving at night and don't want to faf about

Thats the kinda think I'm after although it has to be portable so it can be taken offsite. Therefore we have a safety measure against fire/theft. The office is next to a pub with kitchens so thats hazard.

have you considered an online backup service?
As you've already got your own server, it may be cheaper to back-up to that across the net.

Paid-for online back-up usually comes with some kind of client software, or WinZip10 can even do scheduled backups to a remote FTP server (SFTP).


If not, I recommend "Fire watch duty" in the pub from 6-11pm each night, ensuring a cold Stella is in each hand "Just in case"....



Jason

The office is next to a pub with kitchens so thats hazard.

I'd have said just being next door to a pub was a hazard in itself!!! Kitchens or not.

Proper backup is done with Tape but you can always have and an external HDD and with a small program found in the internet you can syncoinize only the data

You can use the Linux box to scp or rsync the data, with either full backups or incremental to a (remote) FTP Storage area.

Why not try upgrading the drive system into a RAID 0, where you have 2 drives that mirror each other. If one drive fails, the other kicks in without any need for restoring a backup.

If you're concerned about keeping an off-site backup, I'd get a SCSI interface card and a SCSI tape backup unit (Like a HP 500GB tape backup unit that I use). Large capacity Tape drives these days have moved on a lot from their much slower pre-decessors, and can do a lot of the backup work in the background. I know there's higher capacity units available now, but the one I mentioned above would normally be suitable for backuping several drives in one go.

AIT is the most common 'non-enterprise' type for tape now. £500-600 for a 200G(compressed) drive, £40/tape £20 for a cleaning tape. Reason for tape is archival storage life. Which outside most does not justify the cost.

External HDD and an FTP or SAN/NAS solution (both running on the same but staggered schedule - HDD at closing time SAN after hours remote data transfer) is the better option as SAN's especially are much higher RAID level and scatter multiple copies of data over many more devices, NAS can be as little as one drive.

You just reminded me of an external solution by seagate 300GB

Wow , that's pricy (and the ABS backup software is a bit unreliable).

Als' prevous find is way better for the money

You on commision since it's a CC site then

Hmm, why didnt i think of that? LOL

Just a small comment, there is no price limit when it comes to Lives and data

Wow thanks for such brilliant responses.

Internet transfer is not so ideal as there is quite a bit of data to transfer and our upload speeds are only ~ 448 kbps. I think for now the solution is raid 0 and external disks.

If I lost 3.1 over night I think I'd jump off a very high cliff.

Good choice, make sure you use hardware RAID and pull a full backup 'before' establishing the mirror - you'll be best if you can source a RAID disk that has the same drive geometry as the existing one too, so same make model is prefered, good luck

In my experience and what I have set up...

A designated backup machine running RAID 0 with Symantec backup exec software... Then install Symantec backup exec Desktop which allows the user to select directories on the PC to sync / backup to this server, this is done continuously each time a new file is created or changed ( it also has versions on the file, so if you were to make a change and then want to goback you can!! ) Users can also restore files themselves.

Then for archiving a 40GB (80GB compressed) DAT drive... As there are to many moving parts in portable hard drives!!!

Not sure Symantec do a linux version of that though, and HDD's now have very few moving parts, less than a standard DD dat tape. More important with DAT is you need a drive anywhere you may need to access the data.

I have two SATA 80GB hard disks. One of which is empty and looking for a cable.

I'll get hardware raid on the go. I understand the point about moving parts in hard disks.

Does you motherboard suport HW RAID on SATA Al?
If it does your laughing

I've got no idea. It's a baby Dell PowerEdge SC420 - SATA - P4 2.8GHz/1MB, 800FSB.

Only used as a file server and Linux development environment. I put in an extra 80GB SATA disk to so I could use the server for more things by switching the cable. LOL

Looks like I need one of these: http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/85438

Infact I think the server CubeCart is hosted on has a 3ware one.

LOL - it does support RAID, but it's Dells 'shuffly' RAID support, you'd need to enable it in BIOS, and on 2 disks that are blank to be safe, so again the full backup scenario first

Excellent. I'll get that 3ware controller, cable and take a full backup. I'm not sure if the disks are the same speed and don't know if that is a problem.

*Edit* - Yes it is. 2 x 80GB Sata 7,200rpm. They are from different manufacturers though.

3Ware RAID controller in the cubecart.com server, yeah

There is conflict with Dell/Linux/Software raid so hardware is best in this case

If you can get 2 identical disks, an 80-100G disk is pretty cheap now so might even be worth stumping up for 2 new faster/bigger disks for this, it's more preferable than a pick and mix. You can get wierd errors with mismatched disks on RAID.

Thanks EverythingWeb, I remember the hosting company telling me I had to have hardware raid with Fedora + Dell.

I may invest in two fat new disks.

3ware makes the best hardware raid controllers I've ever used quite honestly. I've been using them since 1999 and have never had one crash.

But RAID 0 is NOT what you want. RAID 0 is striping to share the data across two drives. There is NO protection in a RAID 0 configuration. RAID 1 on the other hand is simple mirroring.

The easy way to remember the difference is that RAID 0 has ZERO data protection. RAID 0 is simply used to expand available space across multiple smaller drives.

My absolute favorite is hardware RAID 5+1 which is a set of drives in a RAID 5 array with a 2nd array backing the first up. Unfortunately, that requires a minimum of 6 drives to implement.

Our big Black Friday sales here this week will have 1GB thumb drives on sale for under $14 USD. Same price for Secure Digital cards. For that price, I'm going to buy 2 or 3 of them for backing up my stuff here. I can store every piece of code I've ever written easily on a 1GB thumb drive. Then I just toss it in the car's glove box and don't worry about it.

Thanks Bill.

Raid 5+1 is probably slightly too much for me right now. Raid 1 should do fine to start and thanks for the testimonial about 3ware.

Should've said that before , you could get away with a 4 disk RAID5 (3 data 1 parity), but RAID1 should do you fine with the other backup option