Re: New approach with removable IDE RAID Backup (was: Tape Question)
Christian Hammers <ch@westend.com> writes:
> Hi
>
> On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 04:14:09PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote:
> > > I have a big size file about 33G in /home directory !!! and i wanna
> > > backup this file into tape device....
> Why tape, buy a ATA (IDE) RAID controller that allowes hot swap and hot
> plugable devices (e.g. 3ware). Then setup a raid1 between two harddiscs.
>
> Whenever you like to do the backup simply mount that array, rsync /home
> to it and umount again. The next morning, exchange one of the discs agains
> a new one, the discs are your backup medium. The new disc will be rebuild
> automatically and be available for the next backup after a few hours.
>
> Sounds strange? Well never got the change to test it myself but it could
> work.
>
> Benefits:
> - Cheaper: RAID Controller (300€) + Drive Bay (200€) + 4 drives (100€ pro
> 60GB) are about 900€. This is more than competable with DAT/DDS3 and even
> more with DLT tape drives.
> - Faster and easier when restoring. Obviously, just mount it.
> - More capacity per medium. Splitting up across several media makes things
> complicated.
>
> Any comments?
>
> bye,
>
> -christian-
>
We use a (cold) removable IDE Drive for Backups of our Servers for
some months now and are very happy with it. Setup is as follows:
2 removable 120GB IDE-Drives, one build in a normal Office PC (+ extra
network cards), one at home.
Drives are changed every week.
The PC boots every day after office hours, rsyncs all the servers
(>70GB atm) and shuts itself down again.
Each server has its own partition on the removeable drive which is
bootable.
So if one of the servers is going down, we just have to move the PC
near it, plug it in and boot it. Max downtime 10 mins.
Setup was fairly easy: Just a shell script to call rsync with a per
server exclude-list of hardware-dependant config files, fstab etc.
The main drawbacks are:
- If a server goes down we loose one PC in the Office (not an issue, as
there always some people on the road)
- Syncronisation runs only once a day, so we will have to recover the
changed files of the day by hand.
- You have to think of the excluded config files when changing config
on the servers.
In addition we use tape backups for important stuff.
Next thing i want to try is to use a dedicated maschine and raid over
network block devices instead of rsync. Has anyone experience with
that (speed, reliability)?
Greetings,
Ramin
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