Backup solutions?

[Welty, Richard]

Jon D. Slater writes:
>What are you using for your back-up solution?  (Tar? Rsync?, something 
>else?)

>I'm not so paranoid as to need off site back-ups.

>I was thinking of building a FC4 server box with a BIG drive in it for 
>on-site backups.

>Any recommendations from the group?

i suggest that you actually work out some requirements for your
backup system ("not so paranoid" is a little light on the details).

the usual concerns are things like this:

natural disaster (fire? flood? etc.)

man made disaster (theft? arson?)

power or network failure (handling this implies remote site)

archival requirements (do i need to go back in time?
   how far back? how granular?)

archival usually puts you into tape. remote backup site generally
pushes you towards some sort of rsync replications solution.

be aware that you can't simply rsync an rdbms, you need to do a dump
and then restore or store the dump file as needed. alternatively,
there are replication solutions for most rdbms systems (for both
MySQL and PostgreSQL in the open source world, don't know about
Firebird.)

if you end up going archival with tape/cd/dvd, be sure to regularly
check the media to make sure it works. i am aware of cases where
the sysadmins made bad tapes due to a bad drive for months and months,
assuming things were ok because the system didn't error when the
tapes were cut. oops.

richard