Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 23:34:31 -0700 From: Eric Lee Green <elgreen@iname.com> To: Adam Nealis <adamn@csl.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Tape backups Message-ID: <99091723592501.21348@ehome.local.net> References: <37DF9DD1.C50AE90B@csl.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, Adam Nealis wrote: > Joe Pepin wrote: > > > > Also note that backing up over the network is network intensive. I recomend > > considering a seperate NIC in each server to be assigned a 10.whatever > > address and connected to the backup server. (kind of a SAN-lite) > > > > Not ideal, but what is? > Presumably while connected to their own hub, no? Actually, I might just > think about doing that myself... We do the same here, we have one tape drive backing up every server in the place. There's two ways to do it -- either NFS-mount the directories to be backed up (in which case you could use BRU or 'tar' directly), or pipe the output of BRU or 'tar' through a compression program, send it over the network using either the rmt device or 'netcat' or 'ssh' (if you're paranoid and don't care that it's slow), then 'dd' it to your tape device at the other end. Note that with BRU you can verify your archives after they've been written to tape even though they were created on another machine and ssh'ed over, since it checksums each block internal to the BRU archive format. That's something that these fancy-dancy newfangled programs don't do for some reason. Some things to think about: 1) Don't use hubs between your servers. Use switches. You can get switches for under $300 now, there are now no hubs in our server room. When one server talks to another it basically is talking on a dedicated circuit. 2) DDS3 tape changers are affordable, but rather clunky. Still, they do work. Just make sure you compile tape changer support into the kernel so that you can easily reset it back to the beginning when you're ready to verify (in your script) that your backup was successful. 3) Compressing the stuff (or encrypting it) as it goes over the network turns the limit into CPU power, not network bandwidth. 4) When I look at my MRTG I do note that my network into the tape server spikes at 12am when the tape backups begin, but nobody cares. 12am Pacific Time isn't anybody's prime time. In other words, if you're doing this late at night via a script, don't worry about your network usage too much. Just schedule your tape backups to occur during lulls in activity (unless you're hosting cdrom.com, in which case there IS no non-prime time!). There's some scripts at ftp.estinc.com that do some of this stuff (albeit with 'bru', but 'tar' could be used for many of the same things). You may want to browse and see if there's anything useful there for you. -- Eric Lee Green Enhanced Software Technologies Inc. Software Engineer "The BRU Guys" eric@estinc.com http://www.estinc.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?99091723592501.21348>