We're looking at building one _really big_ server for data backups for all of our clients. The general idea would be that our web servers would all NFS mount this box and run backups to it on a nightly or perhaps weekly basis.

We're a CPanel shop, and I believe that WHM has some built in support for this type of backup procedure. Even if it doesn't, writing some cron jobs shouldn't be all that difficult.

Regarding hardware, we're considering a RAID 1 setup with 4 120 GB IDE disks to start. So a total of 240 GB of usable storage. The ability to expand this later is also a requirement, obviously.

Does any one have experience in setting up a system like this? If so, could you share some pitfalls/experiences?

Take care,

Brian

I was wondering the same thing.

It doesn't much matter, big cheap drives will be a good trip faster than the network you're copying them across.

Hi Brian,

We are running a very similar network backup server on our network ... we call him mrbackup.

We built this server as a means to provide additional backup security for our Linux shared server customers. We have 3 backup routines running and it works very well. All our shared servers are IBM x330/x335, with SCSI drives running Hardware RAID0, so we have some great redundancy there, but in the event we have some catastrophic drive failure our mrbackup routines are backing up critical user data as well as server/OS data [passwd files, config files, etc] that we would need to rebuild a server from scratch.

The routines we run are:

- daily backups
- weekly backup
- monthly backups

This gives us a good "snapshot" of data at different increments. The individual routines do not duplicate data that is already there, in an effort to preserve disc space.

As for the configuration of mrbackup, we're using:

- IBM x345 Server
- Hot Swap Power Supplies
- 1GB RAM
- 6 x72GB SCSI Drives
- RAID5e [provides for a hot spare in the array]
- IBM ServeRAID 4MX Card [dual channel RAID]

Using the 4MX RAID card affords us additional expansion capabilities. Out of the 2nd channel on this card we can add an additional 14 drives through IBM's EXP300 Storage Expansion Unit.

We've recently launched these backup programs to our dedicated server customers as well. As an alternative to the veritas programs we can offer through our IDC partner, our dedicated customers really love the new mrbackup offerings.

Now we're not CPanel users ... we've developed our own Hosting Controller based upon our 8+ years in the hosting business, but we have automated all the backup processes through custom scripts ... so it's certainly possible.

As for pitfalls ... I'd say none outside of the costs of the hardware. We only use IBM hardware for all of our servers [shared and dedicated], and while we do pay a premium for this over whiteboxes, I can assure you from years of experience that the reliability, performance, fewer headaches and peace of mind more than justify the additional expense.

If I can be of more assistance, let me know

regards,

Gene

We use rsync nightly. We always have 1 "current" snapshot and then 7 directories that house the files that have changed. That way, we can always pull anything from 'current', but if we need to go further back, we can go back 7 days' worth of changes; without using all that disk space.

Good luck. :)