Re: Which hardware for saving backups?
On 06/11/07 05:10, Mitja Podreka wrote:
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.
Interesting, and good to know.
XML is *highly* compressible (unless it's chock full of
incompressible JPG files!) so you might only need 100GB or less of
disk space to store the 270GB of data.
Testing will be required!!
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.
Weekly "every course" full backups plus (since Moodle can export to
XML) nightly rsync's to the backup drive would probably work well.
Have 4 external drives numbers #1..#4, with three of them always
off-site, and rotating them weekly.
You'll need to test the practicality of this plan, though, with a
single external drive. The USB drive might not be fast enough to
back up all the data, and other considerations that you have failed
to mention or don't even know about yourself might also be bottlenecks.
Testing will be required!!
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.
:)
Good luck.
--
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!
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