[CentOS] DVD-RAM writer software for CentOS4

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2005-08-15 at 09:05, James B. Byrne wrote:

> We also are looking at tape systems.  The idea is that we will end up 
> with a four stage backup process. 1. Daily automated backups of each 
> server over the network to a local high capacity linux server devoted 
> to hosting the backup volumes. 

Backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) is excellent for this and
it's compression and duplicate file linking scheme will greatly
increase the on-line capacity.

> 2. Daily automated moving of certain 
> critical, volatile backup sets from those on-line local stores via 
> ssh to an off-site server performing the same function.

Depending on network capacity and your backup window, you might simply
run an independent copy of backuppc offsite, using rsync over ssh
for the copy.  This has the advantage of continuing to work if your
main backup server has a problem.

>  3. Daily semi-
> automated (somebody has to change the disc) stores of less critical 
> and only somewhat volatile data onto DVD kept on-site in a fireproof 
> vault. 

Backuppc has a manual command to write the last backup of a single
host out as a normal compressed tar image either to a tape drive or
as files split to a certain size.

>  4.  Semi-automated archiving of the rest onto tape on a 
> weekly basis and moving these off-site (the backup job is 
> automatically scheduled but the media has to be manually handled).

If you are archiving these for a long time, using the archive
function to write tapes is probably the best approach with
backuppc.  However, if the object is just to get copies offsite,
you might be able to use external drives.  The huge number of
hardlinks makes file-based copying impractical so you may have
to raid-mirror or do LVM snapshots and image copies of the snapshot
to make the copy in a reasonable amount of them.  The space-savings
of the storage scheme makes this a nice approach.  I'm doing it
with a 250 Gig drive that typically has around 100 Gigs used, but
it holds a week's backup runs of 28 machines and the uncompressed
data would total over 600 gigs.  I can plug the external drive copy
into my laptop which also has backkuppc installed and have instant
access to any of the files from any of that week's runs.

> The total volume of data handled by all these these processes is not 
> prohibitively large.  We are speaking of tens of giga-bytes (~40GB) 
> over all.

Depending on the rate of change and your bandwidth to your offsite
location, you might be able to let an offsite instance of backuppc
run a complete independent copy and not bother swapping anything
around. Using rsync for the copy method means that only the changes
are going to be moved on each run.  Five of the 28 machines I mentioned
are in remote offices.

---
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com