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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.
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.
Thank you...you show me the hard drive that holds as much as my tape drive does, then we'll talk. And I certainly don't have room in the drive tower for another 7 drives.
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)
Disk to disk backup would require the system to be shutdown, drive added, removed and reboot, configure etc.
Unless they are talking about removable media like CD/DVD/USB devices, this does not make sense.
There are such things as USB hard drives which appear as volumes within the Windows OS, you know. I use such a unit with a cheapo exchangeable ATAPI cartridge bay hacked into it for backup. I call it "tepid-swap"; it's not true hotswap as I have to "stop" the USB device before switching it off but I certainly don't have to shut down the entire system to change the drive fitted in the bay. After I power it up again Windows 2000 automatically recognises the new disk, no reboot necessary.
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!
Thank you...you show me the hard drive that holds as much as my tape drive does, then we'll talk.
Well tell us how big your tape drive is and we can discuss it. There's a LaCie USB hard drive case available with a 1.6Tb capacity in one portable box, configurable as a single volume; do you have a tape cartridge that big? As a USB device it can be plugged and unplugged in a running system with a minimal amount of operator intervention and no need to power down and reboot the system. My own HD cartridge USB device allows me to swap multiple 120Gb hard drives in and out of my system similarly without rebooting, and I trust those drives a lot more than I would trust tapes, having been bitten by "bad-tape no. 3 of 5" syndrome before when restoring backups.
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.
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
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. ========
And how is your RAID going to help you when your data loss is due to an (un)intentionall deletion, and not some kind of hardware failure?
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
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'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.
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
Binaries, word docs, text, database files all compress well on to tape. 1.3TB is about the average of what we get onto the cartridges. RDBMS files and engineering data sets in particular compress to far higher densities, 5TB -> 10TB per cartridge. The drive does the compression so it doesn't impact the client systems too badly.
You can have an external SAIT drive for around £2500. Ours are in big (Hundreds of TB) libraries and cost a bit more. They are actually physically a lot smaller than they used to be.
The point is that hard disk backups are for small networks. People who say tape is dead, back up to hard disk RAID arrays are people who back up small systems or sites.
Deleted
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...
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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...