Small business backups solutions?

[Lloyd Kvam]

On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 15:24 -0500, Ben Scott wrote:
> It's fairly simple to implement a multi-tiered rotation.  The most
> common scenario: Backup everything in full every night.  Have daily
> tapes for Mon, Tue, Wed, and Thr.  Have weekly tapes for Week2, Week3,
> Week4, Week5, that get used on Fridays.  Have monthly tapes (Jan, Feb,
> ..., Dec) that get used on the first Friday of each month.  This gives
> you automatic adaptive granularity -- more backups of more recent
> changes, fewer of older data.  This tends to fit well with most data
> loss scenarios.

An alternative to tiering the tapes, is to tier data to disk.  The
packages rdiff-backup and dirvish provide for date-layered backups on
disk.  dirvish uses hardlinks to avoid multiple copies.  rdiff saves
deltas to regenerate files to a point in time.  Lost files are easily
restored from rdiff or dirvish.  Then amanda can be used to write tapes
for off site storage.  Getting amanda to tier your tapes is probably not
worth the effort.  Use backup disks rather than tapes if you prefer.

-- 
Lloyd Kvam
Venix Corp
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