Need Suggestions for Automated Backup

[Shawn L Johnston]

On Tue, 2003-12-02 at 00:44, Chong Yu Meng wrote:
> Hmm... I never thought about the size thing. Didn't factor it in.
> 
> I'm not sure about RAID, though -- I'll have to do the sums to see if I 
> can build in some redundancy. Which would you suggest ? Mirroring or a 
> full RAID-5 array ? 

It depends on what your goal and finances can allow. Mirroring gives
better data protection but is more expensive then RAID-5. And then there
are all sorts of other fun things to consider like the differences in
write vs read times with different raid setups, plus the big question of
hardware raid vs software raid. If you really want to go all out,
perhaps a mirrored RAID-5 array? Don't forget too check out ebay for
cheep fibre channel drives. ;)

> I'm thinking now of maybe dumping everything into an 
> external hard drive since it's actually cheaper (and faster) than tape. 
> But I won't be able to keep many "snapshots" of the data, I imagine. 
> Typically, how many days data does a company keep?

>From what you origionally described for backup needs this makes the most
sense to me. As for "snapshots", I'd think if you were using some sort
of LVM you should be able to use the snapshot stuff with an external
hard drive without any problems. 

You may still wish too use some sort of other media to make occassional
backups of some data in addition too an external hard drive. I'd
recommend a DVD burner over CD's at this point, or a used DDS-2 (or
DDS-3 or DDS-4) tape drive. Personally I prefer tape, but I'm probably
unusal in that.

How long a backup remains archived is dependent on what type of data. If
your really interested and havent checked out Unix Backup & Recovery by
Curtis Preston (O'Reilly ISBN: 1-56592-642-0) you should get this book.
Even for small home/office users can benefit from this book. Plus it has
some horror stories in it that are far better than any Steven King book
or horror movie. 

Cheers,

Shawn