Linux Server Backup Solutions

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Thu, 2004-05-13 at 21:07, James Brigman wrote:

> 
> If you're stuck with the Exabyte, buy lots of cleaning tapes and use
> them often to keep the heads clean. It ought to work a tad bit better
> that way. Then use the $$ cost of the cleaning tapes to justify
> something sane, like a DLT.

Last night at the TriLUG meeting, a number of people mentioned that
cleaning tapes are a bad idea because their abrasive nature can wear out
the drive heads after a while.  Any thoughts on that comment?

> Going with another hard drive for disk-to-disk backup would be a huge
> improvement. You could build a raw TB of IDE drive space for about
> $1000. 

Definitely.  If you have to really *count* on your backups, modern IDE
drives are a bit iffy, but you could setup RAID5 or RAID zero on the
backup server too, to allow for some redundancy.

Even despite this caveat, I don't see why people put up with the hassle
of maintaining tape drives, tapes, libraries, and the inconvenience of a
character-device backup system.  Hard drives are SO MUCH EASIER on you,
the sysadmin, the user when restores are needed, and the bottom line, in
most cases.  

> Another option might be to do incrementals to disk and weekend fulls to
> the tape drive. Only problem there is that you won't be around
> (hopefully) when the drive jams.
> 

Might as well do everything to disk with rsync snapshots.  :-)

--Jeremy

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