Small business backups solutions?

Tom Buskey tom at buskey.name
Tue Feb 5 16:33:41 EST 2008


On Feb 5, 2008 4:19 PM, Lloyd Kvam <python at venix.com> wrote:

> 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.


Exactly.

The disks have the advantage of  matching the speed of the input data.
Tapes have 2 speeds: fast and stopped.  If the data is arriving too slowly,
they stop, backup, and start again.  This is called shoeshining and can
greatly increase the time to backup.

Having nearline backups on disk of recent data will typically decrease your
restore time as well.

By all means, continue to make a copy offsite on
tape/disk/flash/DVD/CD/floppy.  Your copy will be made faster as well.

btw - for those doing backups to removable drives, how long does the data
stick around when the drive isn't turned on?  The tape manufacturers have
this figure.  Do the drive makers test for it?
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