Re: [cobalt-users] ARKEIA Back up software

[Byron Servies <bservies@xxxxxxx>]

Chih-Lung wrote:

>>>My recommendation on tape drives: don't buy them. Spend $250 for an
>>>80GB drive and use rsync to make backups to that. If you're going to
>>>spend more money, $1200 will get you a RAID-5 array of three 80GB
>> >drives, for 160GB usable capacity.
>>>
>>>Faster, more reliable, instant-restore, random-access, mirroring
>>>capability rather than backup if you want it, remote mounting, and
>>>so on.
>>
>> ...but a real bummer when your building burns down/gets
>> robbed/floods/whatever and you don't have offsite backups.... ;)
>
>
>I guess I am conviced not to use tape drive for backups.  I am going to use
>the harddrive.  But I have no idea what rsync backup is.  Could you explain
>to me in more detail?  Can it do auto-backup? What hardware and software do
>I need?   How do I set it up?  Please help.  Thanks.

Hi there!

rsync is a perfectly reasonable way to performa snapshot backup, and you can
find
more information about it at: <http://rsync.samba.org>.   There are some
drawbacks
that I don't recall having seen put forward here, though.

First and foremost in my mind is that rsync only makes a single copy, unless
you
use something like the examples at rsync.samba.org:
<http://rsync.samba.org/rsync/examples.html>.
Clearly this isn't a problem as backup time, but you will have to figure out
which ones to restore on your own at restore time.  Again, not highly onerous,
but not automatic either.

Byron 
-- 
Byron Servies       Sun Microsystems, Inc.    bservies@xxxxxxx