backup solution 4578

Jean-David Beyer

Small nit--an OS going mad might kill all of the hard drives in one computer, but not all of the hard drives in a reasonably set up network with a backup server. Neither a backup server nor the machines it is backing up need anything more than read access to each other's data.

adapter or enclosure. Standard inexpensive IDE hard drives are used. The entire set of backup drives and USB adaptors may cost less than even a single tape drive (not even counting the tapes yet).

You don't need separate media. Even with the most brain-dead of backup solutions--manually copying a directory, you can have multiple copies from different days on the same parbreastion. As it is, any half-decent backup solution allows for incremental backups that allow multiple "virtual" backups of different days, without the wasted space of duplicate copies of unchanged files.

That's what computer networks are for. You don't necessarily need so much bandwidth devoted to backups since only changed file blocks need be transmitted.

Wow, that's mind boggling overkill! How many machines do you have? I'm imagining hundreds or thousands of tapes.

Any sort of incremental backup system can do much the same with hard drive backups, while consuming much less space and requiring much less time and effort to recover specific data.

But it's better--anyone can browse and restore their own old files, without any attention from the system administrator. If the user isn't sure how far back he needs to go in order to get the desired version of his files, he can browse them at his leisure without requiring a system administrator to manually go through a bunch of tapes.

I don't see why even the current tape needs to be in the same room as "the computers".

It seems to me that you could accomplish much the same thing as what you're doing now with only a few hard drives--two+ "live" mirrors in a backup server (in a different room as the other machines, if you like), and two+ in storage at the bank. Every month or so, half of the hard drives in storage at the bank are taken out so they can be synchronized with one of the "live" drives (e.g. with rsync).

I'm buttuming that it only takes one "live" drive to store all of the desired backups for all of the machines (using incremental backup techniques).

Isaac Kuo