On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Scott Walker <Scott_Walker at ramsystemscorp.com> wrote: > What do you guys recommend for backing up a small CentOS server in a > business environment. It will have (3) 300gb drives in a raid 5 array but I > don't anticipate more than about 25gb of data that needs to be backed up > each night. > I want a lot of backups with a rotation scheme that included daily, weekly, > and monthly copies. I want the daily copies of the data kept until the next > week, and the weekly copy being kept for four weeks, and the monthly copies > being kept for a year. I'd look at backuppc first - running on a different machine which can be fairly low-powered or one that does something else in the daytime. It pools multiple copies of identical content with hardlinks so you can keep much more history online than you would expect, and it provides a nice web interface for browsing backups and doing restores. And it basically takes care of itself. > I have been using tape and the backup rotation scheme mentioned above for > over 20 years. The vendor is telling me they don't recommend tape drives > anymore and all of their customers are using removable hard drive for local > backups. Am I missing something? My instincts tell me the tape drive is > the right solution for a system with a small amount of data, where the > system is used only from 8am - 5pm (so backup speed is not critical) and > where we want to save backup instances for a long time before overwriting > them. > > Any input would be welcomed. Tapes are really inconvenient compared to online backups and disks are so inexpensive these days that tape only makes sense for archiving. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com