Re: Offsite backup
Curtis Vaughan said:
> I was wondering what options there are for maintaining offsite backups?
I designed such a system at my previous company. It consisted of
special backup servers(4U, P3-800, 256MB ram, 220GB raid 10 HD),
rsync, and ssh. I tied em together with a very custom script
which did the backups. I had 1 backup server at each main office,
which, nightly connected to all the local systems(on the LAN) that
needed to be backed up, and grabbed the files, stored them in
/raid/backup/(system name) . Then on saturday at around 2AM the
backup servers would connect to each other and transfer the
data/store it in /raid/remote-backup/(system name) e.g.
mail.mydomain.com gets backed up to backup1.mydomain.com everyday
ldap.mydomain.com gets backed up to backup2.mydomain.com everyday
on SAT, backup2.mydomain.com connects to backup1 and retrieves the
data. so the data as stored on backup1 would be:
/raid/backup/mail.mydomain.com
on backup2 the data would be stored:
/raid/remote-backup/backup1.mydomain.com/raid/backup/mail.mydomain.com
it works quite well, I have it working on about 30 systems for the
past 10 months.
for tape backup I use BRU, I don't trust any other software packages
to my tape drives, BRU is rock solid(but not free). Note BRU pro
I have had a horrid experience with. I know you don't want to
purchase software. BRU I only use for local tape backup, not for
remote backup. My tape backups with BRU were managed by a similar
script I wrote for use with BRU.
I put my script + sample config file here:
http://portal.aphroland.org/~aphro/rsync/
I am by no means an expert in scripting, so the script probably
looks ugly, but it works very well for me. it requires that
rsync be installed on all systems that you'd be transferring to/from.
it also assumes you are using rsync over ssh which depends upon
a passwordless login. This is usually accomplished using key
authentcation(RSA/DSA) with a blank passphrase(what I do), or
using ssh-agent(never tried it). I run the script as root and
login to the systems as root, its the only way I know of to preserve
all ownerships and permissions. Nothing should stop you from running
it as non root if needed though, you'll just lose the ability to
create files and stuff as uids that are not you.
I have used this script in my home network too, it required no
modification(yay). There is the config file too, which stores
all the system specific info.
good luck.
nate
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