On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Sorin Srbu sorin.srbu@orgfarm.uu.se wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Benjamin Franz Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 2:12 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] Backup server
If you have any budget at all, invest in bigger drives. 7200 RPM 1 TB RAID rated drives can be bought for $160 each. Desktop rated 5900 RPM 1.5 TB drives (which you can probably get away with in a dedicated backup server since you don't care a lot about speed and can tolerate long pauses for sector repair) can be bought for $110 each. Check Newegg.
I haven't got a budget really. Today I asked for a new group-printer today and the boss looked pained... 8-}
I opted for the proven 500GB-sized disks and got more of those instead. I've had a handful of 750GB-drives die on me recently. Somehow it feels the technology isn't quite there yet for the bigger drive-sizes. Anybody remember the IBM Deskstars in the early 00's...?
Also, my experience is the more smaller disks you have, the faster they get. Less to write to each I guess.
Second, to maximize 'depth' of backups you should use a 'Tower of Hanoi'-like backup system.
Good advice, thanks!
/Sorin
There seems to be a persistent conception among managers that anything "IT related" is a huge capital expenditure (as it used to be), and there's all sorts of resistance to buying anything new. However, you probably spend more on printer paper in 1 week than it costs to buy a 1TB drive. This kind of equipment is a disposable commodity, even though the accounting department still prefers to write it off over 7 years.
However, IT also has a reputation of always wanting to buy new toys. Many times these toys are not needed, even though the IT person insists that they are. So you need to be able to walk the fine line between these two.
To put it into perspective, ask the manager how much it would cost the business if this data was unrecoverable? After that, if they still don't want to spend a few hundred $$s on the insurance, get it in writing that your manager understands the risk and print it out and post it on your office wall.
Brian Mathis wrote:
To put it into perspective, ask the manager how much it would cost the business if this data was unrecoverable? After that, if they still don't want to spend a few hundred $$s on the insurance, get it in writing that your manager understands the risk and print it out and post it on your office wall.
I was just getting ready to say this. Ask how much it will cost them when they need to pull something from a backup, that they've accidentally deleted and need back.
It really doesn't cost that much to build a small server. I built my own using a 3Ware drive cage and 4 SATA drives. I have 1TB of storage for my backup server. I think I only spent around $2,000 to build it. I'm starting to run out of space now, but we're looking at a cheaper iSCSI SAN to attach to this machine to expand on.
At any rate, you really don't have to spend a lot of money to get something decent up and running. And even if you spend some, you need to explain to management that backups are extremely important. Once you get something in place then, it's important to actually test them and check on them that you're backing up.
That's what led me to BackupPC in the first place. We used to use rsnapshot here, and there were quite a few customized hacked together things that we thought were running nightly, and they really weren't. So, when I started investigating, I realized that our backups here hadn't been taking place for over a month. Bad! So, I found BackuPC to replace rsnapshot, and have been happy since then for our online offsite backups.
Regards, Max
On 1/14/2010 9:23 AM, Max Hetrick wrote:
That's what led me to BackupPC in the first place. We used to use rsnapshot here, and there were quite a few customized hacked together things that we thought were running nightly, and they really weren't. So, when I started investigating, I realized that our backups here hadn't been taking place for over a month. Bad! So, I found BackuPC to replace rsnapshot, and have been happy since then for our online offsite backups.
Backuppc will at least send you an email when the backups have failed for 3 days in a row.
I probably should mention the one scenario it doesn't handle very well, though. If you have very large files that have frequent small changes (active databases, logs, unix mailboxes, etc.), backuppc will store a complete new copy on every run, even though it may use rsync to only transfer the differences. You may gain some space from compression, but the pooling scheme only works for files that are completely identical. File systems like zfs with block-level deduplication might be the best solution to deal with cases like that, or maybe rdiff-backup.
Les Mikesell wrote:
Backuppc will at least send you an email when the backups have failed for 3 days in a row.
Yeah, I have this configured. Although, to be honest since I've set it up, I've not had any failures yet, so I'll have to wait until I do, ha.
Max
On 14.1.2010 17:59, Les Mikesell wrote:
Backuppc will at least send you an email when the backups have failed for 3 days in a row.
I probably should mention the one scenario it doesn't handle very well, though. If you have very large files that have frequent small changes (active databases, logs, unix mailboxes, etc.), backuppc will store a complete new copy on every run,
Another scenario that Backuppc probably does not handle well is backups over the internet of workstations that are behind a firewall. I was hoping the remote users could start the backup of their own workstations using Backuppc:s web interface, but it does not seem possible (even though I haven't tried it in practice), because Backuppc uses netbios names to find the remote machine, and netbios names are not very well routable, I have read. In fact I don't know how this kind of backup service could be accomplished.
- Jussi
On 1/14/2010 11:10 AM, Jussi Hirvi wrote:
On 14.1.2010 17:59, Les Mikesell wrote:
Backuppc will at least send you an email when the backups have failed for 3 days in a row.
I probably should mention the one scenario it doesn't handle very well, though. If you have very large files that have frequent small changes (active databases, logs, unix mailboxes, etc.), backuppc will store a complete new copy on every run,
Another scenario that Backuppc probably does not handle well is backups over the internet of workstations that are behind a firewall. I was hoping the remote users could start the backup of their own workstations using Backuppc:s web interface, but it does not seem possible (even though I haven't tried it in practice), because Backuppc uses netbios names to find the remote machine, and netbios names are not very well routable, I have read. In fact I don't know how this kind of backup service could be accomplished.
The design expects the server to be able to be able to establish the connection to the targets so the straightforward approach would be to use a VPN like openvpn with a fixed private address when the tunnel is up. But it has been discussed on the mailing list and others have come up with ways to do it through ssh port-forwarding with the initial connection established from the remote side.
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Brian Mathis Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 4:07 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] Backup server
[...] So you need to be able to walk the fine line between these two.
I'm trying. Something it just isn't enough. Although the boss has a soft spot for linux, as he also heads the CADD (Computer Aided Drug Design)-group.
To put it into perspective, ask the manager how much it would cost the business if this data was unrecoverable? After that, if they still don't want to spend a few hundred $$s on the insurance, get it in writing that your manager understands the risk and print it out and post it on your office wall.
Rather confrontative isn't it? Me being a Swede, I try to avoid those situations if possible, and find a compromise instead that both parties can live with. 8-} Oh, and I'm a government employee, so the money I spend is tax-payers money. Got to be careful there.
You know how that saying goes? You can chose between good, fast and cheap. But you're only ever allowed to pick any two. For me that's IT in a nutshell. ;-)
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Brian Mathis -
Jussi Hirvi -
Les Mikesell -
Max Hetrick -
Sorin Srbu