________________________________ From: Brian Mathis <brian.mathis+centos at betteradmin.com> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2012 5:38 PM Subject: Re: [CentOS] CentOS Server Backup Options On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 8:12 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. > > The vendor is recommending a RD1000 Removable Disk device. This looks like > it has great specs. Each cartridge holds 160gb (non-compressed) and the > drive costs about $420 but seems that with each removable cartridge costing > $128, we may be limited to how many cartridges we could have, thus perhaps > not retaining backup instances as long as I like. > > I asked about a HP DAT160 tape drive. Each tape holds 160gb > (non-compressed) and the drive costs about $730, and each tape only costs > about $24, so it would be economical to have lots of backup instances saved > for a long period of time. > > 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. A relatively inexpensive solution is to use a system with removable SATA disks (for the backup media) and use an open source backup application called Bacula ( http://bacula.org ) I have a SuperMicro with 8x1TB SATA disks. I keep one for the OS and application, and swap out the other 7 every week.