Re: Off Site Backup: Removable hard-drive racks or external USB hard-drives?
On Thursday 24 November 2005 9:22 am, Andy wrote:
> Hello List,
>
> I am building a backup server using Debian and BackupPC, and would like
> to have an off-site backup rotated weekly.
>
> I wonder if I might ask the list's opinion about which hardware I should
> use to store the off-site backups on?
>
> My tar archive is too large for tape (~300GB) so I have been considering
> either:
>
> - removable hard drive racks with SATA disks enclosed in a caddy
> - external hard drives connected through a USB2 or firewire interface
>
> The "SATA linux software status report"[1] indicates that hot-plug is
> unsupported for SATA disks.
>
> Q) Is still the case where the disk is connected through a removable
> hard drive rack claiming to support hot-plug?
>
> Q) Is hot-plug supported for external hard disks connected through
> USB2 or firewire interface?
>
> My script can umount and mount as necessary, but I would like to avoid
> reboots if possible.
>
> Q) Do you foresee any problems configuring LVM or software RAID on top
> of removable or external disks?
Depending upon the type of data being backed up (if most of it is static) I
would use an rsync script like rsnapshot or some custome script to backup
remotely... of course your intital full backup would be done with the backup
machine local to the server, but subsequent sequential backups would be done
remotely via the internet with ssh and rsync.
I use this solution on a college campus and backup a server from one building
to another, typical backup times are under a minute accross our campus
network... can't imagine if your utilization is similar that it would take
too much longer accross a broadband connection.
Joe
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