Please excuse me if my question seems odd.
I have seen offers for dedicated servers in the range of $99/month with a variety of specs. Invariably, they usually have just one hard drive on them. Clearly you are getting a lot of bang for your buck.
My question is this: what if that hardrive were to crash? How would the server owner be able to recover from that? I know hard drives have become pretty reliable these days, but could anyone legitamately run a server business with such a configuration ... or am I missing something?
I have also seen some companies offer a "network" back-up. How exactly does this work?
Thanks.

One approach would be to get two of the $99 servers and backup one to the other and vice versa.

You have several options.

You can purchase a backup from your provider (most of them would offer the service), you can purchase a second drive and use it to backup your initial drive - assuming your provider offers hardware upgrades, or you can ftp into your account and get your content duplicated to your home or work computer (be selective - you may have to pay for bandwidth).

If you are using Linux or unix, you can automate the procedure using the wget command.

Hope this helps

Backup and recovery are much more imperfect and difficult than most server administrators think. There is no silver bullet out there right now. But a server with only one hard drive can never be considered a "production" server. You can tell your customer base to keep a copy of their own material - they will still be very unhappy with you if you lose their files.

With a second drive you are protecting yourself from a catastrophic failure. For example, you can choose to mirror the first drive - which protects you from hard drive failure. You can also create a backup folder or partition on drive C: so that a scheduled backup is also mirrored to the second drive. However, while a second drive is an excellent backup recovery option, without something a little more sophisticated you are unlikely to avoid some down time in the case of a failure involving the OS. For example, if you mirror drives to protect yourself from a hard drive failure, and if the boot files of the server are corrupted on drive C: by, for example, installing a new program (unlikely but possible), then they are also corrupted on the mirror drive too. So a second drive is excellent protection but hardly perfect. Backing up to a second drive in my opinion is superior to backing up to another destination across a network.

One excellent tactic is to have a three drive system. The third drive is stored "off-line" and rotated with the MASTER MIRROR drive on a routine basis. However, hot-swap drives and rotating drives are not available in a $99 server and most hosting companies or server farms don't offer it at all. I would say use the second drive as a place to dump your content and hope you never have an OS failure - which you probably won't.

Scott Hirsch
securewebs.com

For the most part, I have to agree with SecureWebs.

We don't run a hosting business, so you have to temper my comments with that.

Being a database administrator, the only good backup to me is one that gets rotated on a regular basis. A "textbook" example of this is a certain number of daily backups, then a certain number of weekly and monthly ones. That way you can go back to today, yesterday, last week etc.

With that type of a backup scheme, you can really only implement it with tapes. Most of the low cost dedicated boxes won't come with a tape drive. Even if you can get one, it will be expensive. The drive/tapes are not expensive per-se, but getting someone to physically put a tape in the box every day (and the right one) usually costs.

Having said all that, we have a second drive in our box and use rsync to copy the data. We looked at mirroring but decided agains that. If the box were to get hacked etc. then that would just mirror over to the other drive. This way we have copies from a point in time that we know are good.

We also don't copy every file/file system on the box. We basically backup our "custom" stuff. To me it's just cheaper/easier to have the OS re-installed and then copy our stuff back.

Just some thoughs on how we do it.

Frank

Originally posted by ffeingol
For the most part, I have to agree with SecureWebs.

We don't run a hosting business, so you have to temper my comments with that.

Being a database administrator, the only good backup to me is one that gets rotated on a regular basis. A "textbook" example of this is a certain number of daily backups, then a certain number of weekly and monthly ones. That way you can go back to today, yesterday, last week etc.

With that type of a backup scheme, you can really only implement it with tapes. Most of the low cost dedicated boxes won't come with a tape drive. Even if you can get one, it will be expensive. The drive/tapes are not expensive per-se, but getting someone to physically put a tape in the box every day (and the right one) usually costs.

Having said all that, we have a second drive in our box and use rsync to copy the data. We looked at mirroring but decided agains that. If the box were to get hacked etc. then that would just mirror over to the other drive. This way we have copies from a point in time that we know are good.

We also don't copy every file/file system on the box. We basically backup our "custom" stuff. To me it's just cheaper/easier to have the OS re-installed and then copy our stuff back.

Just some thoughs on how we do it.

Frank


I have to disagree with you a bit Frank.

You state that you need a "rotation scheme" and/or "incremental scheme", and then you rule out all options but tape backups. Why is it you think harddrives cannot provide the exact same thing? - Compared to tape drives, tapes and the cost of having to manually rotate them - the price of harddrives is very low.

Also, you state that you find it best not to copy all files on the server. I have to disagree on that point too, as I find it a very good idea to have each and every file backed up. In the event of a crash, you wouldn't want to miss that one file, or have to spend an hour looking for that CD-ROM you need to use, but haven't used for years.

To the original asker of the question: You could consider using an off-site backup service. That way you have the cheap 99$ server, and you have an offsite backup in case anything happens.

My question is this: what if that hardrive were to crash? How would the server owner be able to recover from that?
At this point, there is no easy answer and backup is costly. However, based on my experience there are 2 things most important I learned to keep the server uptime:
1. RAID 1, 5, 10 or 0+1
3. Hot swappable HD
4. Have identical HD backup onsite (couple of them)
2. Monitor as frequent as possible, or use monitoring device that tells you if your harddrive crashed.

This way, if something happened, you'll have at least alternative drive to substitute while you're swapping the bad drive and let the new drive rebuild itself. So far, I haven't seen any 2 drives (main and mirror) crashed at once (under normal use).

Tape backup is good, but will decrease in quality overtime, and may become unreliable.

I know hard drives have become pretty reliable these days, but could anyone legitamately run a server business with such a configuration ... or am I missing something?

You have to assume that at some point, your drive will crash but if you monitor your equipment closely, the damage may be recoverable.

If the box were to get hacked etc. then that would just mirror over to the other drive.

Frank brought up a very good point, that security is also as important as backup. If your security has been breached, the backup system can be destroyed as well.

What do you all think of periodically ghosting the drive on CDRW? Considering that the cost of CDRW's and the drives have been very low as well?

Originally posted by e5p1der
What do you all think of periodically ghosting the drive on CDRW? Considering that the cost of CDRW's and the drives have been very low as well? That is hard considering you would have to download your entire server, and do it on your computer.

In addition to Fiber, the space of CDRW maybe a little small. But if you can get DVDRW, it maybe a lot better. Or you can get another hard drive (like Scott's idea).

Or you could just have your own backup. I find that is way more reliable than having your host ack up files for you. Or you could have the host server back up files, and have a duplication of the back up files on your own hard drive, floppy disk, CD, etc.

Scott: You wrote: "Backing up to a second drive in my opinion is superior to backing up to another destination across a network."

Disregarding the additional data transfer and overhead, backing up over a network, seems to me, a newbie, like a good way to backup real time data and eliminate the possibility of data loss, in the event of a hardware failure in a server. I just had the power supply in our newest box blow up. Fortunately, it only damaged the NIC. But, if it had damaged the motherboard with the EIDE controller, and we had two hard drives in it, one for backup, that seems like more of a risk to me. Losing both hard drives does seem like a possibility, in the event of certain types of hardware failure within the Server.

Please explain further, your belief that backing up across a network is a bad idea. Thanks! Lanny

I just had the power supply in our newest box blow up. Fortunately, it only damaged the NIC. But, if it had damaged the motherboard with the EIDE controller, and we had two hard drives in it, one for backup, that seems like more of a risk to me. If you include this type of factor into the equation, then any types of backup will not be sufficient (earthquake, emp, radiation, etc will render many things unuseful as well). We probably would need to limit this topic with data-related and media reliability issues. :) (but, feel free to disagree).

In the 3 boxes on our home LAN, I installed "DataPort" units made by CRU, for removable, backup hard drives. I make Image copies of the primary hard drives, using Powerquest's "DriveImage" utility, for backup. That's something like using Tapes for backups that can be stored off site. However, that isn't a real-time event and it's only as good as the last backup. However recent that might or might not be.

Can you suggest a better method, for backing up critical information (such as online transaction data) to another machine, via the Internet, other than sending an Encrypted e-mail to another machine?

TIA