[kwlug-disc] Backup and Recovery in the 21st Century

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

Before you read my message, please visit the Tao of Backup:
http://www.taobackup.com/

Read it?

In the old days, tape was cheaper per megabytes than disks, and allowed for
backup. Nowadays, tape drives are expensive, and there is plethora of
formats. Not as convenient as it used to be.

Many years back, I had a tape drive in the server, when all the stuff fit in
10GB. One tape was stored offsite, so it was a good way for that.

My current date size on the server is 70GB, so that tape drive is long
retired.

Instead, the server is connected to 2 external disks (LaCie 1TB each), but
use daily incremental backup, and weekly full backups. The tool I use is the
good old dump tool, which allows levels (level 0 is full). This makes the
daily backups quite small, and allows recovery from the last weekly + latest
incremental.

I have a script that does that automatically from cron. If someone is
interested in it, let me know.

The only thing missing here is removable media for offsite backup.

The one thing about USB drives is that copying from/to them eats up a lot of
CPU time. At some point in the future, I will switch to eSATA which is both
faster and does not tie the CPU as much. There are eSATA cradles available
on the market to make a hard disk easily removable. Still heavy and not so
rugged as tape though.
-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
http://2bits.com
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
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