Firstly, let me thank all of the individuals who assisted me in
various matters regarding find, tar and ssh last week. Your
contributions were truly invaluable and I learned a great deal
thereby. The reason for that brief flurry of activity was an
administrative and technical move to store-to-disc from store-to-tape
for our server backups.
We presently use a mix of store to disc on various servers and store
to tape depending upon the point of origin; store-to-disc for MS-
Windows and Linux, store to tape for our HP3000 mid-range. These
disparate backup strategies are now being marshalled onto a pair of
Linux servers, one on-site and one at a remote location. At this
juncture we are contemplating methods of creating off-line archives
as well. In this regard I seek your advice regarding the suitability
of employing an LG model GSA-4163B multi-format DVD drive as a backup
device using DVD-RAM 120mm media.
Specifically I wish to know what software is available under Centos4
to record to this drive and which of those are preferred for this
sort of application and how suitable each is for untended backups. I
understand that DVD ram has a ~4GB limit and that filesets in excess
of that naturally require a disc change.
We also are looking at tape systems. The idea is that we will end up
with a four stage backup process. 1. Daily automated backups of each
server over the network to a local high capacity linux server devoted
to hosting the backup volumes. 2. Daily automated moving of certain
critical, volatile backup sets from those on-line local stores via
ssh to an off-site server performing the same function. 3. Daily semi-
automated (somebody has to change the disc) stores of less critical
and only somewhat volatile data onto DVD kept on-site in a fireproof
vault. 4. Semi-automated archiving of the rest onto tape on a
weekly basis and moving these off-site (the backup job is
automatically scheduled but the media has to be manually handled).
We currently use an internal DDS3 tape unit for store-to-tape and are
considering changing to an external DLT drive. I would welcome
comments regarding a suitable choice of external DLT tape drives for
this application. We have used an external SCSI DLT device in the
past but this device needs to be replaced and are open to
alternatives.
The total volume of data handled by all these these processes is not
prohibitively large. We are speaking of tens of giga-bytes (~40GB)
over all.
Regards,
Jim
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James B. Byrne mailto:ByrneJB.<token>@Harte-Lyne.ca
Harte & Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca
9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241
Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757
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