Small business backups solutions?

[Kenny Lussier]

On 2/5/08, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 5, 2008 9:24 AM, Dan Coutu <coutu at snowy-owl.com> wrote:
> > I have a small client (30 employees) using Linux servers that is
> > struggling to find a robust and reliable backup solution that provides
> > bare-metal recovery capability without costing over $10K.
>
>   tar provides bare-metal recovery and is free and reliable.  :)
>
> > The primary challenge so far has been hardware. They used to use 30Gb
> > tapes but now that the servers are bigger this doesn't work.
>
>   You can get a LTO-4 drive from Dell for $3200.  400 GB native
> (uncompressed) capacity.  Tapes are around $110 ($0.275/GB).

Um.... I LTO4 is supposed todo 800GB uncompressed. LTO3 does 400GB
uncompressed. Is Dell selling something that is labeled as LTO4 that
really isn't?

>   Alternatively, the "external hard drive" solution is popular.  With
> 750 GB disks going for $160 ($0.213/GB), they're cheaper than tape,
> even with the cost of the enclosure.  And eSATA can be pretty darn
> fast.  And then you just need "rsync" or even "cp" instead of tar.

You can get 1TB drives (SATA) for around $250. I have done the disk to
disk then to tape thing in the past. My setup was the 3 servers that I
wanted to back up, and a backup server that had 2TB of usable disk
space (4TB total, running RAID 0 + 1). I was using LVM on the servers
that were to be backed up, and every 6 hours, I did an LVM snapshot of
the data. I mounted the snapshot and rsync'd it over to the backup
server. I then dumped the backups to tape from the storage box once a
week.

The only problem that I had wit this was resource utilization. Two of
the boxes had data that were constantly changing, so I was rsyncing
200-300GB every time.

> > I've tried to use the Iomega REV ...
>
>   In my experience, IOMega makes crap and always has.  I know this
> because I own several of their products, and have worked with hundreds
> more.

I stopped buying anything from them a few years ago. They have cheap
going for them, but that is the quality, not just the price :-)