Archiving Data Permanently

[Benjamin Franz]

On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Mike McCarty wrote:

> OTOH, if you have network capabilities to other computers located
> at a distance, then archival over the network, using e.g. rsync,
> is a very viable solution. It does not, however solve the problem
> of backup of the remote system.

I use a pair of backup servers that are physically seperated and that 
independantly perform complete backups daily.

I have two machines with 1.5TBytes of RAID5 (split into two seperate 
drives for performance reasons) . One is in the local office, the other in 
our colocation facility 90 miles away. Every day each machine backs up 
both the machines that are physically local and physically remote over the 
network using an in-house written Perl program using rsync over ssh 
(bandwidth restricted to use no more than about 1/2 of a T1 on remote 
backups), hardlinking and a Tower of Hanoi rotation scheme to keep 8 
daily, 5 weekly, 3 monthly and 2 quarterly images of every system.

It is currently managing backups for around 20 servers total with roughly 
900 GB of disk used for the backups. My rule of thumb for required space 
is that it uses a net of about 2 times the amount of storage I need for a 
single full backup image snapshop.

-- 
Benjamin Franz

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
                                          - Alan Kay