Re: Which hardware for saving backups?

[Mitja Podreka <mitja.podreka@gmail.com>]

Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 06/11/07 00:28, Mitja Podreka wrote:
> > hello
> >
> > I have a web server with about 270 GB of space on the three disks in 
> > RAID5. It's only function is to host a Moodle e-learning system.
> > I would like to make an external backup of user/course files. Not 
> > just for an extra level of redundancy, but also to protect the users 
> > from their own errors.
> > I've read a lot about backup software and already decided about which 
> > one to use. I would like you to ask about advice about hardware.
> > Is external USB disc suitable for this? Should I put an extra disc to 
> > my workstation? Should I make an "dedicated" backup server out of an 
> > old computer and new disc(s)? Should I try to buy some "ready-made" 
> > solution?
>
> Since Moodle stores it's data in MySQL or PostgreSQL, you'll have to 
> backup the whole database.  I wouldn't recommend using rsync.
>
> How does *Moodle* suggest that you back up your data?  If it has a 
> method for extracting/reloading specific courseware, that would make 
> it easier to recover a single teacher's mistakes.
Moodle can make it's own backups of individual courses and this backups 
include XML dumps of course data in database, so I will backup this 
backups. Some of course backup can reach up to 2 - 4 GB and they will 
eat up a lot of space in backups, so I will have to delete them on some 
regular basis.

> How often do you think you need to backup the data?  Do you need/want 
> to do off-site disaster protection or just protect against user stupidity?
I want/must have both. I have to back up data daily.
> > Going through a lot of hardship I could probably convince the 
> > faculty, to invest into some storage solution, but since the server 
> > is one of the only two Linuxes (Debians) on the faculty (the second 
> > one being my workstation) I would like to offer them an 
> > interesting/cheap(er) "OpenSource" solution.
> How is hardware "open source"? 
That's why I putted it in quotes. What I meant  was to use 
older/available hardware in combination with Open Source to do things 
for which the faculty should spent buckets of bucks if they would follow 
their favourite windows way.

thanks,
Mitja