Mark Schoonover wrote:
If you have 20GB of data, using tapes is OK. In my case, I have about 3TB of data that needs to be backed up, and taken offsite. So, the only real option is rsync going out to disks. We started out with using one of the recipes from the Linux Server Hacks book, #38, #41 & #42 to essentially build up a poor man's SAN. Using CentOS installed on systems with 3Ware cards, I have 2 onsite 4 TB NAS. The first one is for network use, the second is for hourly, daily and weekly snapshots of the main NAS. There's a third 4TB NAS that's located offsite in a colo facility that's fed with dual T1s. We can have anywhere from 2-5 GB of data change every day. We're a company of about 50 employees, and we do legal work - so nothing can be thrown away.
This system runs 7 days a week, and it's fully automated with email alerts, etc. The big benefit is restores. We've had our graphics dept accidently delete 250GB of data, and it was trivial to scp the missing data back to the main NAS. It all happened at network speeds, over a GB switch. All the NASes have dual NICS in them, and the second NICS are connected to their own private GB switch - hence the poor man's SAN. When hourly snapshots run, all the data that changes has a seperate GB network to move the data, leaving the office network alone. No user can tell that backups are happening throughout the day.
Maybe this is something I should write up in more detail. The entire system runs on just a couple of shell scripts, rsync, and Perl program to mail out logs....
HTH Mark
If you do by chance write that up, I would be interested in seeing it.
Dustin