Re: [cobalt-users] backup

[Kris Dahl <krislists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 5/2/00 10:29 AM, Ray Yon at ryon12@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> I am leasing a RaQ3 from a company that is very remote from my location.  In
> other words, I don't have physical access to the machine.  The company does
> not provide any means of backup accept leasing another server to backup to.
> That seems a little expensive for a backup system.

I'm surprised they don't offer tape rotation services.  This is very strange
for a data-center.

> I have high speed access to the web and would like to back up the entire
> server on a regular basis.  I have attempted to use the backup system in the
> RaQ3 GUI, but I don't think it works the way I want.   In fact, I haven't
> figured out how to get it to work at all.

This isn't too hard to do, but you do eat up a lot of bandwidth doing it.  I
wouldn't be suprised if you use most of your leased bandwidth on a per-month
basis for backups alone.  Something to consider, at least.
 
> Here's what I need.. A reliable backup system that can back up the entire
> hard drive on a nightly basis via the Internet.  If I can backup everything
> to a my personal computer here, that's fine.  I can then dump my hard drive
> to tape or Jazz Drive.  Either scenario is cool.

Taper will let you create backup volumes like this.

But I would just tar up all the partitions and gzip or bzip them and FTP it.
Simple cron job, using off-the-shelf software.  YOu will be able to extract
the files from pretty much any machine or architecture anywhere in the
world.  That's really nice if you are in a bind and need to do a partial
backup.

You're probably going to need to (or be better off) engineer your own
solution for this.

> I have databases on many domains that change literally on an hourly basis.
> Losing a customer database can cost my clients a lot of potential business.
> The backup system must be automated, secure and reliable.

MySQL has features for exactly this purpose.  You use mysqldump to dump the
db's/tables and then by using the --log-update option on runtime, it will
log all of the SQL Inserts up to current.  So you restore your last database
backup, and then fast forward thru the update log to get to current.  This
works pretty well.

It sounds to me like you are the post boy for a server with more
availability/reliability/servicablity features, such as RAID and/or an
autoloading tape drive.  YOu really should have a system that can survive at
least a single, if not a double disk failure especially if you aren't going
to have immediate access to the machine.  And especially if you have
interactive databases that are constantly writing to disc.  There is no real
easy way to prevent dataloss even if you keep super-great backups.  The Raq3
is just not designed for that kind of use.  I'm actually of the opinion that
all machines really should have RAID (mirrored or parity with striping) if
its a mission critical server.

-k