Hi, all! > To add fuel to the fire, Seagate *again* sent me a refurbished drive > (and I used their advanced replacement program), which has sat in a box > unopened since received. I ended up buying two WD 500GB drives to > replace the single Seagate; one of the drives is used for nothing other > than doing incremental dump(8)s of the other (and the main OS drive). > If either of those 500GB drives fail, I'll be able to recover in some > way somewhat painlessly.
We mirror all servers now, given the low prices of S-ATA disks and gmirror(8). Of yourse this is not backup, but it can be a foundation for backup ... > * All this leads me to the topic of backups. Hard disks are growing in > capacity at a rate which the backup industry cannot follow. It's > getting to the point where you have to buy hard drives to back up the > data on other hard drives, but anyone with half a brain knows RAID is > not a replacement for backups. RAID or mirroring gives you availability and resiliency for single disk failures (at least). Backup should give you an archive of file versions reaching back a certain amount of time to restore slowly corrupted data. The backup should be on a server and/or media different than the backed up one. So we are using a system with two 2 TB RAID 5 volumes that serves as an Amanda backup server. Backups are stored in vtapes on the disks (read: directories) managed by Amanda. Since there is no way that a slow filesystem corruption on one of the clients could affect the backup server, I'd call this a reasonable solution to the capacity problem. If the backup server goes up in smoke, it is highly unlikely that we have a severe need of a restore at the very same instant. We cannot carry the tape magazines around anymore, so if the data centre goes up in flames, we are fooled. Eventually a second data centre, second backup server, fast connection and rsync(1) will do the trick. Which leads us to private backups: > There is presently nothing __affordable on the consumer market__ which > makes backing up 300GB+ of data easy. RAID1 USB2 case for S-ATA disk: USD 400 2 WD RE2 500 GB drives: USD 600 Regular incremental backups: priceless ;-)) Again I'm just doing versioned backups to redundant disks. When I'm not doing backups, I'm not connecting the volume to my Mac, so software failure, worms, whatever, ... cannot by accident destroy the backups. Now, long term archiving ... that's another interesting topic. Kind regards, Patrick -- punkt.de GmbH * Vorholzstr. 25 * 76137 Karlsruhe Tel. 0721 9109 0 * Fax 0721 9109 100 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.punkt.de Gf: Jürgen Egeling AG Mannheim 108285 _______________________________________________ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
