Re: Need help designing backup/server system
Hi Alvin!
The problem is that I am *always* home! These are my
personal computers, at least in the sense that I own them,
but they are used for business purposes as well as personal.
And me thinks you have a simplistic view of Window machines!
I have *nothing* in the "My Documents" folder, and neither
does my wife. I have 30 gig of files and programs and my
wife has over 60 gig. I have no idea how many directories,
or "folders," either of us have.
My idea is to move all this stuff from Windows to a Debian
fileserver, and in the process put it all on raided IDE
drives so one HD failure doesn't provoke heart failure or
stroke.
Actual backups have been of limited use to me at anytime in
the last 10 years. That encompases about six disasterous
failures! In no case was the backup/restore procedures of
any use in recovering the really important lost data.
Generally because the failure occurred shortly before
another backup was done, and 24 hours of work was lost. In
one case, even though I had tested the backup and restore
software nine times, really!, the tenth time I had
unreadable tapes, and that was when I needed it! Hence, my
decisiion to use raid.
Any specific hints or tips along this line?
Thanks!
Dennis
On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Alvin Oga wrote:
>
> hi ya mike/dennis
>
> collection of some backup scripts
> http://www.Linux-Backup.net
>
> -- and yes... backups should be done after everybody goes
> home ...
> and do backups in the middle of the day for the
> past 4 hrs so the morning work is not lost
>
> -- backups media is a whole other backup-wars
> ( tape, disks, cdr, etc...
> ( your budget and data-size will dictate which you need
>
> -- if you are backing up windoze boxes ...
> - you just need to backup their "My Documents" folder ??
> ( all other info is already backed up on the original
> ( windoze cdrom
>
> - you can also put a "linux based home dir" on the
> desktop of each windoze boxes, and only those files
> are backed
>
> - or mount the windzoe boxes to a linux box and backup
> the windoze into linux... and umount it again before
> they reboot their PC
>
> -- Create a backup policy and tell people that only certain
> directories is backed up ...
> dont backup things like /usr/local
> that is cloned in many forms on each PC
>
> ( linux kernels, acroread, realaudio, mpeg players, mozilla, etc
> ( windoze antivirus apps, etc
> ( are all downloades gazillion times
>
> have a central download server that everybody
> downloads their apps into and clone that download server
>
> - when making backups
> - always do weekly full backup ( data only )
>
> - always do daily incremental backups since the last time a full
> backup was done and keep DIFFERENT daily files
> mon, tue, wed, ... if you only care about 7-days of
> incremental backups
>
> - always do incremental backup across 2 or 3 full backups
> ( say last 90 days )
>
> - assume that a full backup failed, due to disks full or
> bad tape... can you still recover ???
>
> - assume server has been cracked, can you go backward
> to find a backup that pre-dates the [cr/h]acker's snooing in your
> network
>
> - do you want a gui for users to be able to search the backups
> for their files they erased ...
> - once they find it, they can tell the admin to restore
> fro tuesday's backup
>
> === all of the above is just one script run from cron
> http://www.Linux-Backup.net/scripts/Backup.pl
>
> c ya
> alvin
>
>
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