Slashdot Mirror
A Primer on Data Backup for Small- to Medium-Sized Companies (Video)
This is a conversation with Jeff Whitehead and Lou Montulli, respectively Vice President of Technical Operations/CTO and Chief Scientist for Zetta.net, a company that specializes in online backup and disaster recovery service. Also, while this interview was arranged without his help, in the interest of full disclosure we'd like to tell you that Zetta's CEO is Ali Jenab, who used to be CEO of Slashdot's parent company. But this discussion isn't about Ali or Zetta.net, but about data backup, and what methods are best and most cost-effective for companies ranging from home-based businesses up to enterprise operations with thousands of employees. Among other things, we discussed the importance of multiple-site storage for important data, a factor that was drilled in to us yesterday by an article titled Another Iron Mountain Fire Points Up Shortcomings of Physical Storage by long-time tech journalist Sharon Fisher. And never forget: You don't know how effective your backup and data storage arrangements are until you try to retrieve your data -- and if you don't try to retrieve data until you need it, and things don't work, you are in big trouble. (Don't see the video? Here's a link.)
used SDLT for years with almost no problems
used disk to disk backup for a year as well. very nice except the PHB gets a heart attack every time you ask for more disk. at least for database backups
been on LTO-4 for 4 years. tapes are cheap. its fairly fast. and haven't had any problems with data corruption or tapes breaking
looking at LTO-6 but the tapes are still fairly expensive
It would help if there were audio with the video.
Anyone tried Bareos? It's a fork of Bacula, which has become rather closed and has isolated most new features to their non-free licensed version. Apparently the Bacula copyright holder has filed a lawsuit against Bareos for copyright infringement.
Why am I seeing this adert?
Riiight.
Because data can be stored on non-physical media?
Rob, lots of genuine, honest respect here. But with the dice acquisition and beta debacle, a lot of effort needs to be made by the editors here to avoid any appearance of using the readers as targeted customers. This interview doesn't help in that regard.
The last place I worked had five DATs. At any given time, four of them were in a safe-deposit box at the bank branch across the street.
At the end of every evening, one of the partners walked across the street and swapped today's tape for tomorrow's, and brought it back.
The tapes themselves were replaced once a year.
Most boring video ever. Is this what you mean when call us an "audience"?
Indeed, blatant slashvertisement. The video DID mention some key points. For those who didn't feel like watching the video or reading the transcript, aside from pure advertising, they did hit four points which I refer to as the golden rules of backup:
Backups must be:
Off site: fires, thefts happen, and they happen in datacenters too.
Automated: people will stop manually copying and swapping, probably at the worst possible time.
Rotated: Not just one backup overwritten daily. If you were hacked at 11:00 PM, that midnight backup doesn't help.
Tested: Of our customers who thought they had backups, over half didn't actually have working backups when we suggested they test them.
In the spirit of blatant advertising, Clonebox provides a very similar service, at a slightly better price, and the owner is a long time /.er
OK, my business is quite small. I archive to a NAS box once per week. I lost some data yesterday (but had the archive from Friday), got everything that was accidentally deleted in about 5 minutes. Done. I use Linux with RSYNC to do archives. Works like a charm. The first backup is the full, and each subsequent backup is a time stamped (partial / incremental) snapshot. If I want a new full backup, I rename the old full backup, and run another archive (and it takes a while). I also have an archive log. There are databases involved too, tables are exported, compressed and timestamped. I also have a very nice 'restore last' application that restores the last database snapshot. The whole thing works like a charm. Bash scripts using RSYNC. And I've recovered more than once, and its very nice/effective. If there is a fire, the NAS box can be unplugged and put under your arm. If you aren't here and there is a fire, you can always store it around a two layers of bricks, with a fire blanket between them. It all depends on how much you want to spend. I spent about $150 as a one time cost, plus about 20 hours to write all the scripts (there are about 10). A partial backup takes about 10 minutes: usually around 2 GB. A full backup takes about 40 minutes, 8 GB.
see subject
Please tell me the browser cache is screwing with me. Please tell me that my wife wants to have sex more often ( ok that isn't going to happen, I have a 12 and 15 year old) Do we really have Slashdot.org back?
No, its more like having the cheapest possible person from the cheapest possible country, reading scripts and excerpts from manuals back to you while being oh so polite about it. And then after your 2 hour phone call, blaming any other vendor or technology you are using which *must* be the cause of all the problems.
Surely its not their flawless product, which even though they are in tech support and must listen to peoples issues all day, has absolutely zero flaws they are willing to admit.
Fact, no one cares more about your data than you do. That ain't never going to change.
This interview transcript (cant watch, get player error) is laughably sparse on any real strategy except "outsource to us!". I feel dumber for having read it.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
I find that the cost of auxiliary equipment, servers, is far LESS for spindles. I just bought a 16 bay SAS jbod for $350. That's up to 64TB raw. A tape library would have cost $3,500.
Sure you CAN have a human switch tapes, just as you can have a human hotswap drives from any old server you want to use for backup storage. At least at the level of about 80 TBs, spindles are a lot less expensive as well as more convenient.
If you already have humans sitting around the datacenter who have nothing better to than switch tapes, and if you have hundreds of TBs, I suspect tapes make sense in that case.
I used to do something similar. Then I made my rsynced copies bootable with qemu-kvm. I already had a datacenter, so I rsynced it there. That provides several advantages.
> If you aren't here and there is a fire, you can always
> store it around a two layers of bricks, with a fire blanket between them.
You COULD, but you probably don't, and overheating would be a concern, as would delaminating of the platters in a fire. Theft is concern as well.
With my better version, I started syncing systems for a few friends. When I needed more capacity, I bought 16 bay SAS JBOB units for $350. It's grown into quite a nice, professional system, with real protection from fire, theft, etc. but my friends still just pay $12 / month to cover the costs.
It starts with one premise: If backups (or drive images) aren't made automatically, they will eventually never get made.
I have three drives, call them A, B and C. We have two servers, two desktops, two notebooks, each of which make a DAILY full-image backup to a separate partition on the same computer, which is then copied to a common, external drive (say "A") on one of the servers. Typically, each system has two or three days' worth of local backup images, and the external drive has about the same. We keep data and programs separately; C: is for code (e.g., Windows & Apps), D: is for data. So, to start with, we have (after the first cycle) about ten backups (one on the system, and three or four each on each of three external drives).
Each external 500GB drive holds about three days' worth of backups; I'm thinking about 1TB drives, soon. I "rotate" the drive arrangement once each week: Each week, I move "A" from Active to Standby (I unplug it) and call it "B"; I move "C" (the eldest, retrieved from off-site) to "B" (i.e., I plug it in), and I move the displaced "B" to become the new off-site "C". So, (Active->Standby->Offsite) is A->B->C, then next week, C->A->B, and then B->C->A.
I can claim, accurately, that while this system has holes, there is so much backup that we've never had a catastrophic loss, which is just fine with me, and very cost-effective. I would no more put my business data on a cloud server than stick a sharp fork in my eye; beyond NSA, there is the constant threat that the business will die, or be closed by authorities (think Kim Dotcom).
Hello,
My day job is at a security software company (anti-malware). We don't do anything in the backup space (either develop software, resell someone else's software, etc.) but I did write a paper on the subject of backups for them, because not every computer problem is a virus. It is more geared towards home users or home-based businesses than the video, above, because I figured that businesses already have some idea about backups—whether or not they are doing them properly is entirely another question, though.
The paper is basically an overview of backup technologies that might be applicable to a single PC or a small LAN, and is completely vendor neutral (like I said, no ties to anyone/anything in the backup space). It is also specific to on-premise backup technologies, as opposed to cloud, because those are the types of backup technologies with which I am experienced.
Anyways, if you are interested, or want to share it with a friend, family member, et cetera, here's the the paper: Options for backing up your computer [PDF, 862KB]
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
It's one of the SGI units. Used, they sell for half that, so I misspoke. The storage SERVERS, with motherboard and processor, are $350. So for $700 you can get the backup controller server with 16 bays plus two more 16 bay jbods to daisy chain to it. Not bad for backup. That's not what I'd use for my main enterprise storage SAN, but for backup yeah it works real well.
That is without the disks themselves, of course. Starting with four or six 3TB drives in RAID 10, you get 150-200 MB/s actual for several hundred dollars, then add spindles as needed.
I meant to say, something like that, a SuperMicro chassis with SAS expander backplane, does of course cost a lot more if you don't buy on eBay. A new one from Provantage is around $700 or so. Still, compared to a $3,500 tape library ...
That's not say tapes don't have their place. Tape was good enough to back up my grandpa's data in 1954 and it's still good enough, sometimes. Other times, large capacity disks really do make more sense.