[TriLUG] Your State of Practice for Backups?

[Stephen Joyce]

Shawn,

Check out BackupPC: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ . I've been using it 
for about 3 years and am relatively happy with it.

It scales pretty well, performs deduplication and compression, is capable 
of exponential expiry for full backups, and is open source.

To give you an idea of the benefits of dedupe and compression, the 
number of servers I have is similar to yours but deduplication and 
compression means my backups take only ~12% of the space they normally 
would. YMMV depending on how many fulls and incrementals you keep and how 
big your daily delta is.

Fair warning though: to get decent backup throughput, you need something 
fairly beefy for your backup server. BackupPC computes checksums of files 
for deduplication, so cpu, memory, and disks are taxed.

Cheers,
Stephen

On Thu, 16 Apr 2009, Shawn Hartsock wrote:

> We're reviewing our backup strategy for our Linux servers. My company
> is running Ubuntu dapper on over 40 servers. Currently, our backup
> system resembles this:
> http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2003/03/06/nfs_backup.html
> ... but I'm curious what are other shops doing? How do you handle
> this? And, how would your advice change if I told you that we're
> expecting to double the number of servers in the next 12 months?
>
> BTW: average size of a full backup of one of these servers is around
> 4.8G and we're likely to only maintain 1G of salient differences
> between the various servers as each server is custom configured and
> installed per client.
>
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