[clug-talk] Offsite Backup Solutions - What are you doing?

[Kevin Anderson]

I've generally bought a cheap box, and filled it with SATA HDDs.

As others have already said, I use rsync to keep the data current every 
night.

I use a mon, tues, wed, thurs, fri1, fri2, fri3, fri4, fri5 HDD, plus 
one for the OS, one for recovery/play, and one for month end.

Each month end, I take a HDD offsite and store it in a safety deposit 
box.

I do not compress or tar any of the files, so recovery means copy from 
the backup server to the production server.  Fast, easy, and simple to 
verify as working or not.  Since each day is on a separate drive, the 
loss of a cheap SATA drive does not impact me very much.  I just replace 
it.  I cycle the drives out as they are outgrown, but benerally, they're 
too cheap to really care about.

The last server I built was ~2000.  You'll want a huge case, and a big 
power supply, some 4 port SATA cards, etc.  But it's very robust, and 
very reliable.

From a tech person's perspective, recovery is easy, but it would be more 
difficult from the end user's perspective...  Unless...  This occurs to 
me now, you could offer the nightly backups as read only samba shares 
off of the main file server.  Then the users could copy their files out, 
but not delete them.  That would simplify things...  Combined with NFS 
between the servers, and LDAP, you'd even have permissions kept 
consistent so that people could only restore what they had access to...

Kev.



-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Watkins [mailto:dave at abacustechnologies.ca] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 10:15 AM
To: 'CLUG General'
Subject: [clug-talk] Offsite Backup Solutions - What are you doing?

Hi All,

I've just started looking at various offsite backup solutions for a 
couple of clients and have been surprised at the pricing offered by some 
providers.
One provider quoted me $3900.00 to store 15GB of data initially with all 
the backups and services I'd like. 

Basically, I have 2 clients in particular that would like to have the
following:

1. store data off site
2. incremental backup nightly
3. ability to search/recover previous versions of a specific file 4. 
data recovery tool should be relatively simple 5. cost effective


My questions are:

1. What solution are you using presently?

2. What led you to chose that solution?
	a. Pros

	b. Cons

3. Is your solution a commercial vendor or one you host yourself?

4. What are the costs involved?
	a. initial setup

	b. monthly charges

	c. "incident" fees ie: I need help finding x.

	d. other

5. Is there an OSS solution that is reliable, robust and easily 
administered by the end user?

6. Any other comments/suggestions?


For those of you that would like to remain anonymous you can always 
email me directly if you like. I'll compile the results and post them to 
the list in a generic format with all the identifiers removed if there 
is a desire for such a compilation.

Thanks,

Dave Watkins




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