[cobalt-users] Re: Backup question

[Johan-Kristian Wold <jkwold@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

In cobalt-users digest, Vol 1 #2141, Richard Young wrote:
> <snip>Has anyone used a NAS server (Like a SNAP Server)?
> How do you back up a box and the individual sites?

We have a Cobalt NasRaQ server, which we back up using Legato 
Networker. The backup works fine, and we can do restores of any given 
version of individual files.

There is some mucking around to get Legato working - check my post in 
the archives around 12 july 2000 for a description.

Legato is an expensive way to back up a server, so it's overkill to 
buy it for just a single "el cheapo" NasRaq. Other options would be 
Veritas and Arkeia, if you want a pre-packaged solution.

> We were thinking of setting each site on a scheduled basis to back up to a
> SNAP type server using ftp.
> Would this work?  How about performance?

If you can mount the remote server by NFS, you could tar or dump 
directly to a file on the NFS volume. How this would work 
performance-wise, I don't know - We haven't had the need for a hack 
like this.

> Then how would you be able to back up the rest of the box?
> How is the restore done using this method - is it clean?

If you use dump, you can restore parts or whole parts of a 
filesystem, using restore.

> Needless to say, we are still looking for a cleaner solution.

Veritas, Arkeia or Legato is a cleaner solution, but maybe a bit 
costly if you'r going to use em for a single server, and doesn't 
already have some of the parts.

Johan-Kr
--
Johan-Kristian Wold, M.Sc.     |
Computer systems administrator | Recursive: Adj. See recursive.
Nor-Trykk Narvik AS            |
jkwold@xxxxxxxxxxx             |                            SAM007HM02