Anders Widman wrote: > > Well, have you ever heard of diskcabbinettes? I use them alot wich means I don't have to have 10 disks in the same coputer at the same time. Then what, hot swap? Well this is very much possible, and secure > (look at Promise.com). > > IDE disk drives are very cheap and fast enough (Maxtor 160GB has a write performance of about 35MB/s in average) for most purposes and does not require special hardware or software. I also developed a backup strategy based on a LVM Disk Array and it works great. I currently have to backup about 100GB of data. I build a mirroring system copying all data each night. Our traditional incremental backup showed, that about 2Gb are changed each day. So, for the next day, a new directory is created and all backuped data from yesterday are hard linked (cp -al) to the new destination. Second, a cp -u updates all files which have been changed. With 140Gb available I can hold about 2 weeks on disk. After that only one snapshot per week, later on one per month is kept. I have to see, how far I can go. In addition i make full backups from these snapshots as an disaster backup. This procedure has a lot of advantages. Recent backups of single files can be done instantaneous. This took me hours of spooling DDS tapes back an forth before. The backup system can even be accessed by the users themselves. The backup mirror is located on an other building, an both systems see each other read only. I think about saving the incremental data on tape too, to have a 3rd stage, if the backup disk fails. Any tape backup can now be done off-line from the mirror. I don't have to spend my weekends changing tapes to realize a fill backup from the hot system. I also may continue to use my old DDS4 backup drive, because it does not really matter if the tape backup is slow. Recovering all data from DDS4 tape may take longer than using some fancy LTO, this will be necessary only if both buildings burned down, and I thing we have a bigger problem then... Dieter. -- Dieter Stüken, con terra GmbH, Münster stueken@conterra.de stueken@qgp.uni-muenster.de http://www.conterra.de/ http://qgp.uni-muenster.de/~stueken (0)251-980-2027 (0)251-83-334974 _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@sistina.com http://lists.sistina.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://www.sistina.com/lvm/Pages/howto.html