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Microsoft Releases Public Beta of Data Protection
Torrey Clark writes "Microsoft has released the public beta of its disk-to-disk backup product, Data Protection Manager. The product is designed to make backups easier than simply backing up to tape. Disk-to-disk backup completes images in significantly less time, meaning much less downtime for systems during backups."
So it seems DPM is only a "data-mover", so it will need to be combined with another technology, after some research i found this:
StoreAge Networking Technologies announced that it will be developing enhanced solutions to support Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager
The full article is: here
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Yes it can and has been able to for some time, at least on the server side. Windows Server 2003 has a service called Volume Shadow Copy which is designed to do exactly that.
Sometimes systems will need to be brought down before performing a backup. Otherwise the image might be in a state of flux, causing potential problems during recovery.
Some backup utilities provide capability to take a snapshot and backup that snapshot while the system continues to be used.
One of the features Microsoft is touting in this product is 'moving only the byte-level changes of the file servers' thus eliminating any downtime.
You've never heard of using broken mirrors, I take it?
Zero downtime. Instant backup for a change. Sure, you need RAID-1 for it, but disk is cheap compared to the data on it.
Also, various products have quite capable open file managers. We use Veritas Netbackup at my workplace, and it's excellent, cross platform and high performance.
I don't recall /. articles for the release of any of these applications:
Freshmeat Backup Apps
(flame away)
I have used Acronis' backup product on my workstations, and it works on-the-fly. I even tested it by doing a full backup, formatting the system disk, and restoring, and everything "came back" like it was before I did the backtup. Acronis certainly has an excellent product.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I take it that you have never heard of snapshots and file system freezes then? It goes like this; freeze filesystem, take snapshot, unfreeze filesystem. Typically this takes place in under 10 seconds. Then you backup using the snapshot which can take as long as you need. Provided you don't run out of snapshot space of course. Then you release the snapshot once the backup is complete. Try man xfs_freeze for information on how you backup on real operating systems.
"Oh, not available for Windows, so you'll have to buy a product instead. But isn't dd much easier than using a program that expires after 270 days."
Check here, and after your done, go buy yourself a clue before you post utter bullshit again.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Funny how people complain (above) about having to buy a separate product to enhance Windows, AND complain about Microsoft crushing the little guy when they bundle similar utility programs with the o/s.
My point was, fill the filesystem to the brim with 0x00 files, wipe them out, then pipe dd, through a compressor (which will catch the zeroing done, bzip2 works really well here), then to where its going.
With the added benefit of overwriting unallocated space. You don't want deleted files to be recoverable*.
(*Unless you do, of course...)
I've recently been using Subversion as a backup solution at home with great success.
My server runs it's own SVN repository and each of my machines can check in it's important files into the tree.
This backup solution is quick and thanks to tools like TortoiseSVN integrates into the desktop for ease of use.
Additional bonus factors are the ability to see the revision history, roll-back, full cross-platform support.
You can also manage multiple copies of the same file to multiple machines should you need to work on them or just want additional resilience.
The real icing of the cake of course is that you can run it over SSL via Apache or over SSH and therefore remotely access your backed-up files from out on the Internet should you suddenly need an invoice or a photograph while sitting in a net cafe in a foreign country.
Oh, and it's free by both definitions. http://subversion.tigris.org
[)amien
I would imagine that xfs_freeze just redirects all write i/o to a snapshot volume and overrides all read i/o with data in the snapshot volume (if the data requested has been written since the execution)
The applications don't even know what happened, it all happens at VFS level
The server can produce snapshots etc and there seems to be some tie in to standard file save/open dialogs so users can access previous versions.
Disk manufacturers will love it :-)
A SAIT cartridge is about 10cm square and weighs what? 200 grams? *That's* portable. The drive is capable of 78MB/s sustained, 50% faster than USB 2.
Course, you've got to pay for performance.
Hard drives have a place in backup, but it isn't for very high capacities or offsite storage.
Deleted
I don't understand? That's precisely why we started doing it.
We have an offsite server in a managed facility to which we back up each night over SDSL - nightly update via RSync for ~400GB of total data is around an hour on average. This server collects data from two sites, in the event of total system failure at either site, we've got lots of options depending on the disaster - home users could connect directly, somebody could physically go and pick the box up and install it as a replacement, etc, etc.
Much less effort and downtime than any tape backup system we've ever encountered.
For day-to-day restores (deleted files, etc) we have a similar system at each office, which implements the symlinked backups - I could restore right now, in literally 10 seconds, any file on our network shares exactly as it was at the end of any working day between now and the 5th of January. Perhaps more importantly, pretty much any competent user can do the same, without having to bother me. Show me a tape system which will do that!
420LTO 2 drive
200 GB Uncompressed. Exact same size as a CDROM. Multiple tapes available.
How much does it cost you to have 30 hard drives? 30 tapes?
Redundancy, my friend.
Fellowship 9/11
Yes, I could as well configure the hard disks in a RAID configuration. The advantage would be instant mirroring of everything written on the disks. However, I don't really need that. I would lose lots of disk space in RAID. I have 2x160GB hard disks. In a RAID configuration, I woud have only 160GB free space (ie. 160G / 160G = 100% overhead). In my case, the total size of the "important data" is now only round 8GB. I have two copies of the backup, so I'm wasting only 2x8GB = 16GB for backup. The backup directories are actually NTFS compressed folders so the real space uesd for each one is just 5GB instead of 8GB or 10G in total. So, now I have only 10G / 320G = 3.1% of overhead! :)