[CentOS] CentOS Server Backup Options

Mon Mar 12 19:37:25 UTC 2012
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

Steve Lindemann wrote:
> On 3/11/2012 6:12 PM, Scott Walker 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
<snip>
>>
>> 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
<snip>
>> 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
<snip>
>> Any input would be welcomed.
>
> I believe in tape... it's just not a viable option with the large disk
> sizes we have today unless you have a lot of money for a fast,
> multi-drive solution.  I can backup a bit over 500GB daily in 3 hours to
> external disk.  Using a single tape drive that would (and did) take far
> too long.
>
> So today I use TB size drives dropped into an external docking station.
>   The docking station plugs into the server using eSATA.  Then it's a
> relatively simple script run by cron to handle the daily backup.  I'm

Yup. Our home directories (NFS mounted) are on 2TB (or are being moved to
them) drives; and we have online nightly b/u's that way. The semiweekly
offline b/u's are to 3TB drives, dropped into an eSATA bay. The eSATA bay
is about an order of magnitude cheaper than your vendor's recommending,
and the eSATA uses bare drives, not even needing sleds. *Much* cheaper and
easier.

For that matter, if you have to restore from it, assuming you don't need
everything, it's much faster and easier.
<snip>
> The big difference with disks is that I just do full backups each time.

We use rsync w/ hard links.
<snip>
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