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Searching For A Reliable Backup System?

Posted by Cliff on from the when-tape-isn't-good-enough dept.

InfoSec asks: "We run a great deal (read all) of our current business on Linux, and we have found that tape backup is far too unreliable for our purposes. We have used Quantum DLT 7000s (two of which died), and we have two VXA drives (11 hours to restore three tarballs). Is there a better solution?"

2 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. Redundant tape arrays by Tet · · Score: 3
    tape backup is far too unreliable for our purposes

    So use redundancy. RAIT is the tape equivalent of RAID for disks. Basically, your data is written across an array of tapes with varying amounts of redundancy (from simple parity, all the way up to mirrored ECC stripes, depending on how much you want to spend :-). There uses to be a CLARiiON DLT array, but since EMC's buyouy of Data General, that seems to have been discontinued. Still, there are plenty of other suppliers of tape arrays. Here's one from Adic, and here's one from Compaq.

    --
    "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
  2. Re:Backup programs ? by larien · · Score: 3
    Try Amanda. It's free, runs under most versions of *nix and will even back up SMB shares (if you have samba installed). It is also fairly intelligent and will run different levels of backup depending on how much has changed on disk (eg, if not a lot has changed, it'll do an incremental; if a lot has changed, it might as well just do a full dump etc).

    We use it here to backup our Unix stuff and it rarely needs poking; it just chugs away in the background and the only intervention we have to do is change tapes every day (which you'll get on any backup system without a tape array).
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