Re: Backup advice

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 10:03:40PM -0400, Jason Lixfeld wrote:


On 23-May-07, at 9:23 PM, Doug Hardie wrote:

The criteria for selecting a backup approach is not the backup
methodology but the restore methodology.

Excellent point.

Perhaps I'm asking the wrong question, so let me try it this way
instead:

I'm looking for a backup solution that I can rely on in the event I
have a catastrophic server failure. Ideally this backup would look
and act much like a clone of the production system. In the worse
case, I'd re-format the server array and copy the clone back to the
server, setup the boot blocks, and that would be it.

Ideally this clone should be verifiable, meaning I should be able to
verify it's integrity so that it's not going to let me down if I need
it.

I'm thinking external USB hard drive of at least equal size to the
server array size as far as hardware goes, but I'm lost as far as
software goes.

Sounds like you are not quite as critical as the other post - somewhere
in between.

If you want an immediately available clone, then the best thing is
to have an identical machine, preferably off-site and maintain it
as a clone, probably using rsync, although you can reasonably use
dump/restore for that too.

If you need calls for just being back up in a reasonable length of time
then you might prefer dumping to some media and if the need comes to
restore, then you would have to recreate the disk structure - using
fdisk, bsdlabel and newfs from the fixit image on the install CD or
use sysinstall to run them for you. (I suggest that any serious
System Manager become familiar with fdisk, bsdlabel and newfs, even
if you usually let sysinstall handle them for you) Then you would
use restore to pull the dumps back in.

If your system is super critical as Doug Hardie posted about his,
then you may want to use some combination of rsync-ing to a close
and making dumps and consider storing some of these off-site.

////jerry


Any advice appreciated.
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