I am just wondering if there are alternatives to tape backup? It just seems a little expensive to backup a 36GB hard drive that you have to pay $1000 for the drive and $500 at least for software. Can you do SCSI backup? Can you have a hard drive backup to another hard drive not like RAID 1 but a backup that only happens once a day?

Originally posted by netsolutions
Can you have a hard drive backup to another hard drive not like RAID 1 but a backup that only happens once a day?

Of course, many hosts do so.
All you need is a small script to copy all important files...

yea make sure the script preserves the file permissions/attributes coz when you use the shell command "CP" it doesn't preserve those settings... You end up having to re-chmod all your cgi-scripts.

'cp -p' does preserve as much of the timestamp, flag, and owner information as allowed by permissions.

Keep in mind that a backup on a second drive inside your server provides only limited protection. If there is physical damage to the server, then both drives may be damaged. If somone cracks into your server they can delete both your primary and backup drive, leaving you in much worse shape than if your backup was on removable media. The obvious upside to backing up to a hard drive inside your server is quick backups and restores.

I'm of the opinion that a backup drive is a good idea, but it should not be your entire backup system. I guess you have to ask yourself how much you stand to lose if your backups are destroyed along with your server. Would it ruin your business? How much is your business worth?

-joe

Another backup solution that someone has brought to my attention is just backing up the admin files. They said if you just backup the admin files for apache then you can back that up right onto your PC or a CDRW. The theory was that if your hard drive crashed or whatever, you would have to install everything anyway and just replace the config files when that is done.

You might want to look into the amanda.org project. It is a very well thought out and implemented backup system. It is designed to do network backups and it'll backup unix, linux and windows machines. Check it out.

I setup a NFS server with 100GB raid 5 and use a program called Reoback to backup. The files are instantly avail for restore and are safe.

Originally posted by remarkable
I setup a NFS server with 100GB raid 5 and use a program called Reoback to backup. The files are instantly avail for restore and are safe.

Hi remarkable,

I now use reoback with ftp backup. It uses a local directory to temporary store archives. But what if the tar file is very long and there is no space to temporary store it locally, so my question is,

does reoback store the whole file before transfering it using ftp , or just small blocks so that the file system does not get full?

From your experience, did you face a situation where there is no space to save the temporary file?

Thank you so much.

One thing that some people at RackShack.net did was the concept of "backup buddies". Two people, each with their own server, give a shell account to the other person. Then the servers store each other's backups, so that if one server gets cracked and everything is wiped out, the other one still has everything.

It requires some degree of trust between the two machines (backup files can be encrypted before being sent over which can guarantee Confidentiality, but not Integrity).

Note that if machine A is hacked, and machine A contains the script that logs in to the machine B backup area, then the hacker can determine the password to the backup account on machine B and wipe that out too! So, the backup script for backing up machine A should probably run on machine B and pull the files from machine A! This requires some acrobatics to get around the permission system though. (Gah, this is kind of theoretical; I don't know of a backup solution that does this, although it shouldn't be *too* hard to get one...)

Hi!
The backup drive idea is good only in cases where clients delete the files accendently. In case of hacks, power surges etc... both the disks would fail.
You could try keeping the two disks in two different servers. This may help but may turn out to be more expensive.
I also feel that the user data is just as important as the config files. So you must back up both otherwise it may be a mess...

Have a great day :)

regards
amar