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Best Backup Server Option For University TV Station?
idk07002 writes 'I have been tasked with building an offsite backup server for my university's television station to back up our Final Cut Pro Server and our in-office file server (a Drobo), in case the studio spontaneously combusts. Total capacity between these two systems is ~12TB. Not at all full yet, but we would like the system to have the same capacity so that we can get maximum life out of it. It looks like it would be possible to get rack space somewhere on campus with Gigabit Ethernet and possibly fiber coming into our office. Would a Linux box with rsync work? What is the sweet spot between value and longevity? What solution would you use?'
I'm glad someone brought up the difference between redundancy/failover and backup. If you really care about your data, mirroring to another server isn't a much better backup solution than using RAID with mirroring. It protects you against hardware damage, but not necessarily against data corruption or data loss. If you're going to rsync to another server, you should look into having it keep backups instead of overwriting when something changes.
As you mentioned, nightly snapshots are a great way of handling it, too. However, I still like the idea of writing to tape periodically. Writing to tape provides a real backup instead of just a mirror, it's easy to send them offsite, in some ways they're less fragile than hard drives and supposedly easier to recover if they do break. Also, depending on how much is changing how often, rsyncing might use up a crap-ton of bandwidth (though apparently that's not as big a deal in the submitter's case, since he has GigE).
On the other hand, your suggestion of building a duplicate of the "real" machine has a benefit that other backup solutions don't: in the case of a real disaster, you not only have your data saved on another machine, but you can use the backup while you recover the original server. On the other hand, I don't know how much to trust a Drobo device, so in this particular case I might suggest getting some heavier equipment. (Or are Drobos actually good? I've never used one.)
Of course, there's another issue that I haven't seen anyone bring up, which is: is all of this data vital? You have 12 TB of storage, but is all of that completely irreplaceable, necessary data? Are some of those temporary files, scratch files, working files, or cache? Is any of it just dumb crap that you don't care about? It may seem like a dumb question, in every company I've worked for, if you give the employees free access to any amount of space, they'll fill it up. They'll have 20 copies of the same file, and someone will have put their 100GB MP3 collection on the server if you don't keep them from doing it. If you can organize the files and sort the necessary files from the crap, you might be able to cut down on the amount you need to back up.
Then again, storage is so cheap, maybe you don't care.