[thelist] backup plan

Richard Bennett richard.bennett at skynet.be
Tue Nov 30 17:43:29 CST 2004


On Tuesday 30 November 2004 23:33, Ken Schaefer wrote:
> Things to be aware of:
> a) OP is looking at 750GB of data *per backup*. Since most hard disks top
> out at about 250GB each these days, you end up needing a lot of disks to
> handle this size data set
Yeah, the system I'm talking about holds 2000gb, but half is lost to the raid 
mirroring alone.
You can script your backup to rotate over several days, but it might be better 
to use a compressed format or different medium if you want to rotate 750gb 
for 7 days,.
In my case It's more important to have a recent version of all files easily 
available in case a computer is not accessible, and I've been bitten by 
malfunctioning restore procedures so often in the past I prefer regular 
uncompressed files.

> b) What if you need a document from several versions ago (or from several
> backups ago). That really bloats the dataset. Suppose you need a month's
> worth of backups. At 750GB each, that's approximately 22.5 TB of data. 
That's a whole different ballgame.

> Also, if you have Windows servers, I'm not sure whether RSync will backup
> "system state" - generally to do that you need to call the APIs that
> Windows exposes. Products like NTBackup or Veritas BackupExec use those
> APIs to backup system state (eg certificate store, COM+ catalogue, AD
> databases, SAM, that otherwise can not be backed up reliably)
Good point - I don't know. I only have a few Windows workstations backing-up 
their /my documents/ folders. 

Richard.


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