Backup Options?
 

What are people using to backup their computers? What new products are out there?

I hope everybody IS backing their shit up.

servers or desktops you mean?

For desktop i use the iomega back up imprtant shit

I use a 120GB external harddrive. I picked it up for about 200 dollars.

yes, iomega is very good!:thumbsup

Yes, I am talking desktops, not servers.

What kind? Where? USB or Firewire? Does it hang, crash?

I want to get one, but there are so many different brands.

Thanks! :drinkup

How much data are you backing up?

Backing up 10-12 gig of info.

cd roms for now.....

bump... more suggestions?

norton ghost

Backup Exec to a DDS3 tape drive.

I do a full once a week with diffs nightly. I also rotate the tape sets out of my house to a safety deposit box to guard against fire/disaster at the house.

Maxtor has some very big firewire drives that are pretty fast. Never crashed on me either.

For desktop I use a scsi VXATape drive from Ecrix.com .. I backup all the desktops/servers in my home office twice a week & take one set of backups to my colocation center.

At my colocation center, all of my servers & clients' servers get backed up to a massive mirrored raid, then dumped to tape one full backup a week, with incrementals everyh night. The tapes go offsite once a week, the data on the RAID stays onsite for a month.

Just back-up to a second hard-drive. They are so cheap nowadays, and it's about the easiest solution.

Carol Cox :angel

Hard drives are a really shitty solution.
They have something like a 40% failure rate, and they really are slow.. Even the fastest scsi drive is slower than tape because of the way the media is.

Tape is a STREAMING media.. So for backups and restores, it's very, very efficient. You just dump the data and it writes block 1, block 2, block 3.

Hard drives write in this fucked up cylinder/sector situation, and NOT sequentially either. Anybody who's telling you that hard drives are faster and more reliable and cheaper (in the long run) than tape is a rank amateur.

If you are backing up on a large harddrive you really arent protecting your data. Large IDE drives always fail, I had a 200 gig drive on me after about 1-2 years. Back up your important shit elsewhere or you will be crying later.

Yes, there is a small chance your back-up hard-drive may go. But he was asking about backing up a a desktop and not a server. There is a big difference on the life of a drive depending on it's use. I highly doubt that both drives will go at the same time. We've been mirroring all our home drives for years, and have never had a problem.

I was providing an inexpensive and simple solution, nothing more. Like any advice or comments, he is free to accept or disregard it.

Carol Cox :angel

A slower tape drive is still a better bet then an ide drive or even a scsi drive.

In general IDE drives have something like a 20% failure rate averaging over 2 years of usage. Another joy about ide drives are lower manufacturing tolerance than scsi drives because they're "desktop" class hardware.. Cheaper bearings & lubricants, less control on cleanliness of manufacturing plants in terms of acceptable airborne particles, etc..

A good cheap solution is a cheap promise IDE raid card, mirrored, and a daily backup onto a scsi tape drive.

Cheap is nice and good.. But how much money do you lose when your entire hard drive is wiped out due to virii, electrical surge, clumsiness, wear, mechanical failure, circuit failure, hyperactive cats?

The last time I lost a drive that was crucial was 3 years ago, giving me a week of inproductivity and $2500 to have the disk restored.. I learned my lesson that day.

Hard drives have a higher failure rate than tapes? Hard drives are slower than tapes? WTF are you telling those people???

Norton Ghost for OSs
tar+gzip+cdr for the important files,

no backup :thumbsup

The truth, both from research, and my 10 years of experience as a systems administrator.

Hard drives are slower than tapes for restores and full backups because of the nature of hard drives. People don't believe it, but if you understand how magnetic media works, it' becomes clear :

Hard drives do not write data sequentially, and file systemse DEFINATELY do not write data sequentially. This means for large restores and backups, and retrieval/writing of lots of small files, the head on a hard drive has to move around a LOT. It might be somewhat faster for in dividual file restores, but that's it. Hard drives also have a lot more moving parts than a tape.

Tape drives write and read data in sequential blocks, which means large writes and reads, or reads and writes of large numbers of small files, are a lot quicker. Because tapes write sequentially, they use space better as ell, where hard drives are limited by sector size. There is no seek time because it is a dumb "read block 1, readblock 2, read block 3" ..

If your hard drive writes in 1k blocks, a 50byte file and a 1020 byte file will both take 1 block, which is pretty damned inefficient.

I proved this to a rather moronic CEO I used to have to deal with, who claimed it was more efficient to deal with the loss of 1/2 of one hard drive per week in a very large backup raid, instead of having 4 tape drives. His method was to backup to a large (30 disk) raid 10 once a week and switch it with another one. Which meant moving raids back and forth, which meant an average of 1/2 of one failed disk a week. It all works out in the numbers when you do the statistics of a hard drive's mtbf and divide that statistic between the number of drives.

Rudeboi, you sound pretty convincing, but in my experience I dislike tapes totally.

About six or seven years ago I had a tape backup system. Slow as shit. Because tape is "linear", to get one tiny file -- that would *always* be at the back of the tape -- it would take 25 minutes to seek. Two minutes to verify and buffer. A micro second to copy.

If I needed another file I would have to wait another 25 minutes for it to go to the beginning then start the process over again. (Total 50 minutes to get the second file, not counting another 25 again to rewind!) After that crap I won't ever go back to tape (unless they have changed radically in some way since that time.)

Even if I didn't need another file, it still wouldn't let me take out the the tape until it rewinded to the start first. That's just insane.

I'd recommed a large external HD using USB 2.0 or Firewire.

That's the drawback of tape. Newer tape systems like dds8 & ait4 are a lot better, but still suffer that problem.. that's why for just random file retrieval, you use a disk cache for "easy file safety" needs, and tape for data retention and disaster recovery needs.

RSync - I use it to daily mirror the important data from one W2k desktop to another one.... I also use it to create a monthly backup

raid

Rsync between failover pairs onto mirrored disks + tape backups = best cheap bet.. better bet is doubling that with 2 seperate failover pairs, each box having different types of motherboards/revisions of network cards/different raid cards, and each half of the mirror should be the same size disk but either different firmware revisions or different brands of disk entirely.

Hmm. I see your point a bit better and appreciate the feedback, Rudeboi. Think I'll stick with the speed factor for now, but I will have to consider the tape after all as something additional for down the road.

Yeah, for that type of file access, Disk is FAR superior.. that's what disk is designed for..

But the next time you have to restore 500GB of data from raid, you're going to wish you had 2 streaming tape drives :)

usb/firewire sucks! they're still IDE .. I'm ALL scsi at home, it's
more expensive, but it's only money.. they're more reliable and WAY more faster..

200GB external HD

The problem with this is also what happens when a virus corrupts a file and then it is mirrored over to your second hard drive... you are out of luck. Same thing if an OS/DB file corrupts and then gets mirrored. Mirroring is not backup it is redundancy.

Not to mention what if a fire or flood gets to your PC, those with a home based business with all thier content and files on those PCs are going to be in for a world of hurt.

Good call.

I suggest everybody read the book "BluePrints for High Availability" .. can get it for about $32 on amazon, and it gives you a whole new perpective of the meaning of downtime for your sites.

i dont back up

*shakes your hard drive as it's spinning*

iomega

A REALLY good software solution for backups, is Amanda.. the best part about it is that it's open source. Check it out at http://www.amanda.org/

Now still every 2 days with GHost on another HDD. Soon I will have RAID(already safer for disk failures) and an swapable HDD for the backups...

Andre

Ghost is kind of nice.. Good for desktops..

A ghost-like option that I like is systemsimager (http://www.systemimager.org/) It used to be part of VALinux's VACUUM .. it's really useful.. but it only manages linux right now.. I used to use it @ this beowulf cluster place.. start to finish I once had a thousand node cluster (after the hardware was built and put in) up and running its hardware burn-in regression tests in 9 minutes.

Anyone know of any off-site back-up options?

Regardlesss of the method - tape, scsi, ide, whatever, you're still pretty much fucked if your house/office burns down!

Yeah.. thoughout america are 2 places called "IronMountain" and "DataSafe" .. They'll come and pickup your media/files/whatever and transport them in armored cars to their storage facilities, where they keep them in safety deposit boxes within vaults in huge reinforced concrete warehouses that are protected by armed guards 24/7 ..

this is true, and that's why it's good to not only backup, but have redundant backups.

as an example:

1. use a host that autobackups weekly (i.e. webair)
2. use raid mirroring
3. i use additional slave IDE HDs inside servers whose only purpose is additional (weekly) backup
4. portable HD usb2.0 HD's for "offsite" backup (once a month exchange drives with host by fedex---in this way if your host has a catastrophic failure or becomes insolvent at least you still can recover your websites)---a good cheap way to do this is buy the USB 2.0 external HD enclosure kits (lots of them on ebay for approx $30 each) and then buy big cheap IDE HD's (200gig) and install them into the enclosures.

I like to have dozens of backup sets, going back years. Best for me these days are dvds. You get about 5 gig on a 85 cent disk, and you can just pop them in to restore files, good shelf life too.

Just bought a new pioneer 4X for under $200...

lan backup... server. i'd like to add a tape system, but damn, a good tape to back up 150gb+ is so fucking expensive. i don't want to really use a home-system qic80 or some shit and have to use 600 tapes. (yes, i know qic80 is VERY old... but it's the first name that came to mind :) )


but for some of those newer ones.. you're looking at a few $k for just the drive, and sometimes over a hundred dollars for one freaking tape.


i really should have bought that scsi seagate i saw back on ebay some time ago. it ran on magazines, and would backup 96gb on one magazine. (autoloader).

I enjoy DLT

I have a 7-tape DLT autoloader I got off ebay for $900.. I spent another $500 to get a DLT8 drive to put in it (it had a dds4 in it) .. it works great.. I bought about $400 worth of tapes.. and I backup all of my servers at the datacenter.. each tape holds 80 gigs I do full backups of our main raid server which right now is about 400GB, and another 2GB for configuration backups (effectively doing full backups except for system binaries on 12 servers).. I do full backups sunday night.. Monday morning I go in and put in another set of tapes that does daily incrementals)
do another full backup thursday night and do incrementals from there..

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh