On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 08:53:08AM +0530, Masatran, R. Deepak wrote:
> I need to backup a partition on my hard drive. Currently, I am trying to get
> CDRW-Taper to work. Is that the best, or does anyone recommend anything
> else?
"Best" can be anything...
CDRW-taper is geared to work with amanda, which is great for backing up
multiple machines on a network to a central backup.
It could be argued that amanda is "overkill" if you only want to back up
a single partition on a single server, as there are many other backup
tools that are not network-capable.
> Also, how does software RAID level-1, with a partition on another hard
> drive, compare with backup onto optical disk? I carry my hard drive around,
> and will not be carrying the backup hard drive.
RAID and backups have different (but overlapping) purposes. E.g. with
RAID you still have no (or at least: very little) protection against
"operator error" (=accidentally deleting files) and the like. And
restoring individual files in RAID is at best cumbersome, but the norm
for most backup tools. Both give you some protection against media
failure though.
Perhaps you need to think about it differently. Backing up is NOT
important (by itself). Ability to restore/recover *is* important - and
you should choose your tools and strategy accordingly:
- What do you want to be able to recover from? e.g.
- media failure (favours disk-level backup/raid)
- operator error/file corruption (favours file-level backups/rsync)
- How long can recovery/restore take? Instantly? within 6 hours? This
really depends on what your downtime costs...
- When you *do* need to recover, how far back in time do you need to
recover from? 5 minutes ago? yesterday? last month?
E.g. media failure is usually detected quite quickly (noise and smoke
are good clues), but file corruption may remain undetected for a
while...
- Cost:
- software cost (zero if you know what you're doing, thousands if PHB
is allowed to choose)
- media cost (cost of e.g. tape drive + media)
- performance degradation (backing up takes cpu, disk & memory to run)
- operator cost (tape robots? operator wages?)
- any other factors you may want to throw in...
So "best" really can be anything, so it's really a question of plugging
your circumstances into the (somewhat fuzzy) equation...
Hope this helps
PS: http://www.linux-backup.net may be useful for you...
--
Karl E. Jorgensen
karl@jorgensen.org.uk http://www.jorgensen.org.uk/
karl@jorgensen.com http://karl.jorgensen.com
==== Today's fortune:
Some don't prefer the pursuit of happiness to the happiness of pursuit.
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