Back up and .... Re: HDTV tuner cards

[Dan Coutu]

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 13:50, Andrew W. Gaunt wrote:
> We are looking for a potential solution to backup ~3T of data on some 
> linux boxes.
> 1T/box. Anyone have any recent experience/wisdom for such?

There are a number of possible backup solutions available
for Linux. Whether or not they are a good solution for your
particular case is dependent on a few things (that you should
nail down anyway):

1 How much time can the backup take? Less time is more money.
  Backing up that much data can take days with a wimpy
  solution.
2 How often do backups need to be done? Every day? Week?
3 What would you like to backup onto? Different media have
  different costs and size limits.
4 Do you need to be able to do a 'bare metal' disaster
  recovery of the entire system? Or do you only need to
  recover files?
5 Is there anyone in the current organization that has the
  skill set necessary to setup and operate the backup system?
  (This may seem a silly question, it's amazing how often
  the answer is no.)
6 Are you backing up a database? Many databases require a
  special backup procedure in order to insure that what
  you backup is not corrupt due to active transactions
  happening in the middle of the backup.
7 Does the backup have to happen on a live system or can
  the system being backed up be taken completely offline?
8 How much can you spend? Solving this well is probably
  going to cost some serious bucks just in hardware alone.

Hope this helps.

-- 

Dan Coutu
Managing Director
Snowy Owl Internet Consulting, LLC
http://www.snowy-owl.com/