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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."
Don't know about the rest of the world but we don't have to take systems down to backup them here.
Now, if Microsoft could actually release a product that didnt require an amazing array of backup software, we'd be talking business.
this sig no verb
The really surprising thing is that they released the source code, and here it is:
/d/s/e/c/f/h/k/y
xcopy *.* "x:\"
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'
We've been doing disk-to-disk for a year or so now using rsync's --link-dest feature to create apparently complete mirrors each night, but with only those changed files actually occupying disk space (beyond that of a symlink). Makes restoration an absolute breeze compared to tape, but I'm not sure if this M/S effort does the same? *runs off to look*
What's wrong with:
o
m /e valuation/faq.mspx
dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/mnt/hdh1/path/to/desired/backup/image/here.is
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.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/dp
Q. When does the DPM beta expire?
A. The Data Protection Manager software expires 270 days after installation.
Microsoft has also said that it won't be using its own software since it prefers to destory any information that could be used against it in a court of law.
Nerver more will you have to endure those painful minutes between rebuilding your system and getting re-infected.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Imagine that...less down time. Who would have ever thunk it.
Disk to disk backup would require the system to be shutdown, drive added, removed and reboot, configure etc. How this is better than Tape Backup? In fact Tape Backups do not require downtime at all.
Unless they are talking about removable media like CD/DVD/USB devices, this does not make sense. But in that case, this method would be useless for data larger than maximum allowed space on these devices.
Or is this just RAID-1 backup without the read performance boost?
--trb
Someone criticized the "downtime" thing. Frankly, in order to get a good backup, any other processes running on data should not be in flux or the backup itself could be corrupt. So even in most conventional backup schemes, there is a period of time in which backups run and nothing else does.
Another point is that I do not see where it will support operating systems other that Windows. This is to be expected, but a mature solution should be capable of backing up multiple operating systems as many sites I have seen have a heterogenus computing environment. At my site there are Windows servers but there are also Novell, Linux and SunOS. Is there a solution for those too?
On the other hand, if we're talking about what essentially amounts to "dd" I am sure there could be a handy Knoppix CD created to suit the task in some automated way. It could actually be quite simple in that at a certain time of day (night?) power to a bootable external CD drive is enabled, the system is scheduled to reboot at the same time, it boots from CD, runs "dd" per the scripting in the custom Knoppix where it finishes the job by writing out information to a log file about success or failure and then reboots the computer again. That's just off the top of my head but I am sure that even more elegant schemes could be cooked up. This solution would be effective at creating viable images at a good speed and could even utilize compression along the way.
If Microsoft wants to make a "ghost" backup, then maybe they should just license the technology from Symantec.
Haven't RTFA because I couldn't be arsed.
Shouldn't the system back up to a disk spool and then to tape for offsite storage? Hell, even the freebies Amanda and Bacula do that already. And Yup, Bacula is available for Windows.
It does have to be said though that some very expensive commercial backup systems are only just managing to include disk spooling prior to tape ( Having had to deal with it for several years, I refer to that steaming pile of dung which is Netbackup).
Deleted
At risk of stating the obvious, it's a beta. Not a full release.
As such, yes it'd be nice if they gave it out with a "full life", but nine months is far better than 30day trial periods etc.
Any sys-admin installing a beta with a defined 270 day limit on it and using it in a "potentially mission critical environment" deserves to be sacked anyway.
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Any sysadmin using expiring public beta software for production backups, shouldn't be a sysadmin in the first place. Don't blame Microsoft for this.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I don't recall /. articles for the release of any of these applications:
Freshmeat Backup Apps
(flame away)
Did you miss the word 'beta' -- or would you actually use a time-limited beta version of a backup system on a real server? I think you save more face by picking the former.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Now it would be nice to get 5$ each time data is corrupted by this backup system.
Disk-to-disk backup? In fact, I (ie. my computer!) do it every night. Simple copy command? I think that does not cut it. I'm in a tight development cycle and each day write a lot of code, documents and receieve/generate lots of data files. I need to back up all important data but surely I don't need to make backup of the executable files, temp files, OS system files and such. The solution that I use is simple: I have two hard disks in my computer. The files that I need to have back-up from, are scattered on these two drives. Now, I have made a BackUP directory on each one of these drives and put a copy of all important files in them. So, I have 3 copies of every important files: the original, and two back-ups. In case a hard-disk goes banana, I always have a copy of all important files on the other one. I run the back-up every night. Just need to copy the files that has been changed or the whole new directories made during the day. So the problem is: I need two desinations for each source. I need to be able to select which directories or even which files to back-up (or not to backup) and I need to check which files have been changed or which new files (or directories) have been created. I need to be able to schedule the back ups for midnight and I need to forget about all these details in practice as I have to focus on my work :)
How I did it? Well, I tried a script in the beginning but found it difficult to manage over the time and it was very tedius. Now I use SyncBack which is a freeware program with all these features that I need (and more! like FTP and compression to Zip, etc.). QED.
"Please insert disk 2 of 1,270,196 in drive A: and click continue"
A beta Microsoft product for backing up all of my critical data! Where do I sign up?
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
It's a BETA - use it in a production environment and you deserve whatever bad things happen to you.
Now *really* dangerous product groups with pre-programmed expiries are foods! They're not even marked as BETA! Go waste your time bitching about those non-BETA products that expire even though you've paid for them instead.
Best that these people get to make this kind of decision as soon as possible so they can be sacked and can go on to a career they are more suited to, for instance burger flipping.
Installing beta test backup software on production systems?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
couldn't you just do that with RAID and not have to pay even more money to microsoft? i understand that isn't the point of RAID, but you can use it to backup your data on the hardware level, instead of whatever buggy software they come out with next.
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
The article is about a backup solution for Windows servers. The GP writes about a backup solution for Linux+Samba, which is often used as a replacement for Windows. How is that "totally" off topic?
We're also aware that system administrators often commit horrible -- albeit accidental -- decisions in a pinch.
Only poor ones. As as systems administrator I would never use a beta like this to backup ANY data that was important.
You really have bigger problems with budget/manager/etc if you don't have a better backup product to use.
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
it costs 50 dollars, isn't beta, and it works :)
Seriously, Ghost 9 is great, and creates images without the need to reboot your PC/Server. Picked up that ability from Drive Image when Symantec bought out Powerquest.
If you really need the uptime, you may already have a storage unit, which is almost certainly capable of snapshots/snapclones with close to zero downtime (some of them don't even bother copying the full contents of the drives -- just the differences!).
Anyway, this would be only for databases, AFAICT. Any other kind of data usually does not need that kind of bringing-down-the-server-for-backups consistency.
So, what's the point? Is this to be sold to enterprises that are so small that don't use storage systems, and most certainly don't need the uptime?
No, really, it doesn't look like MS will get much revenue from this.
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 :-)
I've already switched to samba and rsync. Microsoft's backup was outdated by at least a decade, and even failed to complete at random when I've used it for disk to disk backups. And Windows' mandatory file locking policy makes safe, reliable backups entirely impossible. An xcopy backup is even dangerous, because it temporarily locks files as it opens them for reading, potentially causing other server processes to fail if they attempt to write to the files.
Here's a link to a similar tape drive. Ours is slightly older, and a bit smaller I believe, but I'm not the guy in charge of nightly backups, so I can't give you the exact model at the moment...
_ _LTO_Tape_Library/270032-100/p/404584
http://www.superwarehouse.com/Exabyte_Magnum_6x60
It would be a poetic mental picture if we're not talking about fat, overworked, graveyard-shift sysadmins trying to finish their nighties and go home...
From the FAQ:
a customer has to purchase a server license for every DPM server that is deployed and a Data Protection Management License (DPML) for every server they protect.
Now they have incentive to never upgrade the poor quality backup software already included in Windows. Admins will have to buy their backup software seperately or look elsewhere. Server operating systems are expected to come with _good_ backup software, so from a strictly technical sense Microsoft is being an ass.
It looks like you are backing up data...
I exclude dvd and movie files and iso's, this makes one snapshot 17G (my home is 34G), and all the snapshots combined (15) are 25G.
So, for the price of a small harddisk and some cycles i've got the perfect backup. I have been burned by harddisk failures two times (and lost some stuff) so i'm pretty anal nowadays.
Start here with rsync backups:s
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshot
Jaap
It's not doing a sector by sector copy from one disk to an identically sized disk, it's copying the files from one drive to space *within* another drive. The receiving drive (or "drive") will most likely be on a separate server with space to hold multiple full and/or incremental copies. This is a very common feature of backup software, they do backups to more than just tape.
What makes this newsworthy is it's Microsoft so they'l likely undercut the prices of their competitors and use their insider knowledge of Windows and their server software to ensure that data (especially things like MS SQL server) is backed up in a restorable state with minimal/no downtime. Also, I think if it's integrated with the Volume Shadow Copy it can improve that technology's ability to allow restores by users (vs. admins) by offloading the shadow copy from the server to a dedicated backup server.
Hi!
.. but tell me, where can I find an useable Backup program from my SuSE 9.2 Professional? Windows 2000 Professional as well as Windows XP Professional both have a good schedulable backup program (included free as it should). But there is nothing on SuSE. (Ok, there is tar, but that definitely does not count! And then there is that on system backup in the YaST, but even that doesn't come close to what a backup program should be like - in order to be useable.) So, in terms of backup software, MS seems to be way ahead of SuSE, which is about the best regarded distro nowadays...
You all seem to bash MS again...
Doesn't Ghost let you swap out OSes?
I bet the Microsoft tool doesn't do that!!!
Actually, Ghost 9 is fantastic, it now creates incremental backups.. which on my home PC, completes in less than a minute. (ie. I don't really notice when it kicks in).
Add excellent scheduling and I really recommend Ghost 9.
...at least from Microsoft perhaps. This sounds like a straight copy of Novell's data protection server feature and, no doubt, a few other technologies from various platforms. I wonder if they'll even copy the Explorer shell integration? I think the Novell one is a bit more than RSync and traditional backup but is limited to Novell's file system (NSS) as I understand it. It's more like CVS meets backup. It is disk to disk but the target disk isn't a duplicate of the source (i.e. not COPY, XCOPY or RSync). The target is a database of versions. I think Microsoft's is similar. In NSS the file system internally tracks changes and can give you them in a list (doesn't need to be trawled for changes). It supports snapshot with copy on write at the file and volume level so you can exclusively lock a file without preventing it from being changed (though you have to have some knowledge of concurrency among your applications to use it safely). Files retain all security attributes in the archive. Users can do their own restores from their workstations (Windows ones get a context menu option) and their access rights are enforced in the retore software so they only see files for restore that they had righs to originally. The common restore case: single file due to user error I believe. If users can restore their own files you don't need to recover a tape, cue it and wait for it to spool to the file in question.
We use NTBACKUP and mtftar with great success. With a SYSPREPP'd install disk, restoring a kaput Windows machine takes about 20-30 minutes. With mtftar, we can cherry-pick files without booting a windows machine.
NTBACKUP can create ".bkf" files that surely, aren't as fast to create as shadow-volumes, and incrementals aren't useful for large files (like rsync), but they have advantage is that they can be stored on a remote machine on the cheap!
Considering that Microsoft's releases of software tend to be somewhere around most other company's late alpha or early beta testing cycles, quality wise... I don't think I'd want to even think about trying a Microsoft beta data backup product! I can just see it corrupting the backup and the original, simultaneously!
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I'm using the following method:
;))
I have a directory tree where I keep all the important data.
In its root there is a Makefile and a set of scripts that are called by that Makefile.
When I go to that root directory and run "make", what happens next, is:
A list of data repositories available from the current machine is read (cat repos.$(hostname)). I have different sets of reachable repositories at work and at home...
Then, in a loop, data is "rsync -avu"-ed from all repositories. They may be remote ("-e ssh" gets appended), they may be local.
I receive only the new/modified files from those repositories.
Then, in a similar loop, data is "rsync -avu"-ed TO all repositories, so that new/updated data files collected from repositories, get distributes in the identical form to all the other repositories.
I refer to this algorithm as "gather-scatter".
This way, I have 4 mirrors of my important documents at work, and 3 mirrors at home. They are kept in sync.
(BTW, since I don't use the "--delete" option, It gets hard to delete an important file from this distributed storage. Either accidentally, or on purpose
Never lost important data since when I've implemented this.
Sony's SAIT is 500GB native (1TB compressed is a pretty good real-world estimate). If you use actual backup software, of course, you don't worry about fitting everything on one tape (or worry about what tape has what data, etc).
For larger backup requirements, just get a tape library and good backup software - this has always been the best solution, if your data's worth over 100K.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Its called Raid mirror's using hotswappable discs.
1) take disc out
2) insert spare disc
3) disc that is taken out is verbatim backup of what you have, so go take offsite
4) Spare gets mirrored with live data by the raid to resync it.
5) cookies allround.
Coz the real secret is to be able to pull data back and in an organised way, this is were all great backup plans usualy fail.
Now had they said they were going into the heriacial storage game with nice cheap solution and nice end-abUser interface then I'd be going yeah great, go Microsoft. But it aint and I shant.
Until then...
Yup. Sounds like Microsoft. Where do you want to go today?
As for code, I do one better, I use a version control system so I can replicate changes on any number of computers at commit.
...in this one. other backup software has been doing this already for years. i have been doing it for a year now. the article mentions CA and Veritas as two of the companies with backup software which is capable.
so, this is news because; microsoft released something?
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
They probably did, and they'll probably try to claim prior art from way back to windoze 3.1 days...if not stopping at win98 se
Considering the past and represent behavior of this past recidivist, recalcitrant, intransigent, convicted monopolistist, why was Samuel's comment/remark marked as "flamebait"?
After all, this is microsoft/mshaft (say it in the tone of "THESE ARE ROMULANS! You show weakness, and they'll come back with not just ONE ship, but with EVERYTHING they've got! You're the expert modder who marked him flamebait; you KNOW this; why are you chopping him down?) (lower-casing/deprecation of ms' name intentional/perpetual with me...) we're talking about. Doesn't MATTER that ms "donates" (read: we'll donate you computersif you agree to never change the OS, just like we bend manufacturers over the barrel (even tho some are still trying to get to Linux after they've mostly dumped Solaris...) schloads of money or s/w with pre-arranged hardware drops. Once you've destroyed companies (bankrupted via vaporware, sued based on nebulous claims, lied to judge with fake video testimony in court, affecting possible outcomes of companies trying to make 3rd-party add-ons if the verdict lands in favor of 3rd-pty s/ware makers...)
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I've been using live backups on FreeBSD for a while now, and I have had 0 issues with it. The way it works:
:-). After a file system restore the transaction mechanism of your database should get things consistent again.
- dump requests snapshot of the volume being backed up
- file system creates *consistent* snapshot of file system (volume managers can't do this!)
- dump makes backup of snapshot
- dump removes snapshot
Just pass the '-L' flag to 'dump'.
If you use another backup utility you may have to write a script to create a snapshot, and mount it through a loopback device. Nothing a good sysadmin can't handle.
It works great. Just make sure your datebase transaction logs are on the same volume as the main database
Namaste
Why am I marked troll? I was'nt implying one was better.....just asking about the differences
You can also view this as the typical Microsoft "why don't you partner with us since we don't want to do that -- oh my, look at how much money you're making -- sorry, we have to crush you know". In this case, the hapless partner is Veritas. Last time I talked to someone there, the slightly nervous attitude on Microsoft's threatened rollout was essentially a hope that customers will not really want to trust their data to a Microsoft product.
They may be right. It's certainly somewhat unusual for someone to roll out a big public beta of a backup product -- people generally want to get the feeling that their backup software is free of data-losing bugs at v1.0, not have to wonder if all the 567 bugs reported in the beta period really got fixed and fixed correctly.
If the Microsoft DPM product actually ships, I'm sure Veritas will have some sleepness nights waiting to see if it takes some of their market share. And probably a few more sleepness nights waiting to see if Longhorn will provide some undocumented hooks to Microsoft's product that gives it an edge in doing things like hot backups of particular kinds of data Windows uses.
There seems to be some confusion about hot backup in this thread. Basically, you cannot do a hot backup of an entire disk that maintains integrity without the cooperation of any software that might be running. There's just no way backup software can magically intuit that third-party software is in the midst of a logically atomic operation that required multiple writes to the disk.
Database software that uses transaction protection (which is a minority of all databases on the planet) can, of course, recover integrity even in the face of a backup that does not coordinate operations with it. But the kind of people who would buy Microsoft DPM would probably be running a database that comes with its own hot backup solution.
But the big news here is simply that disk-to-disk backup cannot get more mainstream at this point. It's rapidly gone from a kind of novelty alternative to tape in certain situations to hot new product to so-boring-that-now-even-Microsoft-does-it. There's no shortage of tape installations that will persist because they are simply good enough, but it's getting tougher to find enterprises that are planning a big investment in a new tape backup system.
I caught it in meta-mod and marked it unfair.
Wish I could do more.