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?'

Comments

Done to death.

[Zlurg]

Holy crap we're approaching the need for an Ask Slashdot FAQ. I feel old.

Re:Done to death.

[Magic5Ball]

Cue usual discussion about defining the problem correctly, choose the right tool for the job, etc.

Specifically:
"Would a Linux box with rsync work?" - It depends on the objective business requirements you've defined or been given. If those requirements include "has to be implemented on Foo operating system", then those requirements are not just for a backup solution.

"What is the sweet spot between value and longevity?" - Simple: Graph accumulated TCO/time based on quotes from internal and external service providers. Throw in some risk/mitigation. Find the plot which best meets your cost/time/business requirements.

"What solution would you use?" - Almost certainly not the solution you would use, because my needs are different. What is your backup strategy? What are your versioning requirements? What are your retention requirements? (How) do you validate data? Who should have access? What is an acceptable speed for access to archived data? What's an acceptable recovery scenario/timeline, etc.

If you do not already know the answers to those questions, or how to find reasonable answers, ask neighboring university TV stations until you find one which has implemented a backup solution with similar business requirements as your's, and copy and paste the appropriate bits. You'll likely get better answers from people who have solved your exact problem before if you search Google for the appropriate group/mailing list for your organization's level of operating complexity, and ask there instead of asking generalists on slashdot, and hoping that someone from your specialist demographic is also here.

Re:Done to death.

[neiras]

I feel old.

Well, your UID makes you older than me.

I SAID, YOUR UID MAKES YOU OLDER THAN ME.

Also, my name is NOT "sonny boy", and this is my lawn, not yours. Where do you think you are, old timer?

Need more information

[belthize]

A couple of details you'd need to fill in before people could give legitimate advice.

What's the rate of change of that 12TB. Is it mostly static or mostly dynamic. I would assume it's mostly write once read rarely video but maybe not.

Do you have a budget ? As cheap as practical or is there leeway for bells/whistles.

Is this just disaster recovery. You say if the station gets slagged you want a backup. How quickly do you want to restore. Minutes, hours, next day ?

Do you need historical dumps ? Will anybody want data as it existed last month ?

Is it just data you're dumping or some windows App complete with Windows registry junk that needs to be restored (don't know anything about Final cut pro)

If you just want to dump data and restore isn't critical, you just need to be able to do it in some time frame then sure rsync'ing to some striped 6 (or 12) TB SATA array is plenty good.

Re:Need more information

[Krondor]

The parent is absolutely right. We don't have enough details to really make a recommendation, but if the question is 'can rsync replicate 12 TB with an average rate of churn over a 1 Gbps link reliably'? The answer is an emphatic and resounding YES!

I used to maintain an rsync disaster recovery clone that was backing up multiple NetWare, Linux, Unix, and Windows servers to a central repository in excess of 20 TB over primarily 100 Mbps links. We found that our average rate of churn was 1% / day which was easily accomplished. It was all scripted out with Perl and would notify on job status each night or failures. Very easy to slap together and rock solid for the limited scope we defined.

When you get into more specifics on HA, DR recovery turn around times, maintained permissions, databases and in use files, versioning, etc.. things can get significantly more complicated.

Check with the university

[darkjedi521]

Does your university have a backup solution you can make use of? The one I work at lets researchers onto their Tivoli system for the cost of the tapes. I think I've got somewhere in the neighborhood of 100TB on the system and ended up being the driving force behind a migration from LTO-2 to LTO-4 this summer. If you are going to go and role your own and use disks, I'd recommend something with ZFS - you can make a snapshot after every backup so you can do point in time restores.

Also, I'd recommend more capacity on backup than you have now to allow versioning. I was the admin for a university film production recently (currently off at I believe Technicolor being put to IMAX) and I've lost track of the number of times I had to dig yesterday's or last week's version off of tape because someone made a mistake that was uncorrectable.

rdiff-backup: like rsync with versioning

[Z8]

You may want to check out rdiff-backup also. It produces a mirror like rsync, and uses a similar algorithm, but keeps reverse binary diffs in a separate directory so you can restore to previous states. However, because it keeps these diffs in addition to the mirror, it's better if you have more space on the backup side.

There are a few different frontends/guis to it but I don't have experience with them.

Re:Automatic internet backup

[Kjella]

[3 months later]:
<admin@uni> OMG we lost the server... 0 seeds!? somebody seed plz!