[TriLUG] Your State of Practice for Backups?

[Shawn Hartsock]

Thanks for the links ... we've got a NetApp device and our Admin is
currently telling me we don't have to worry about deduping since the
NAS will automatically dedupe everything for us. Is that true? I could
imagine a compressed file system that could do Huffman coding or other
compression algo on every byte thrown at it... hmm... if that's true
then there's no real reason to make backups any *more* complex than
they are I suppose.

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Brian <spiffytech at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Shawn Hartsock <hartsock at acm.org> wrote:
>
>> We're reviewing our backup strategy for our Linux servers. My company
>> is running Ubuntu dapper on over 40 servers. Currently, our backup
>> system resembles this:
>> http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2003/03/06/nfs_backup.html
>> ... but I'm curious what are other shops doing? How do you handle
>> this? And, how would your advice change if I told you that we're
>> expecting to double the number of servers in the next 12 months?
>>
>> BTW: average size of a full backup of one of these servers is around
>> 4.8G and we're likely to only maintain 1G of salient differences
>> between the various servers as each server is custom configured and
>> installed per client.
>>
>> --
>> /** Shawn.Hartsock  //*/
>> --
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>>
>
>
> I've had good experiences with rsnapshot- it's easy to set up and is fairly
> flexible. It's an incremental backup tool- it creates a folder with a full
> backup (just a copy of the specified directories), then creates new folders
> with hardlinks to the original files every time it does a new backup. Each
> backup folder looks like a complete backup, but the the hardlinks limit
> space consumption to only the files that change between backups. It supports
> snapshot rotation as well, so you can keep a few dailies, plus a copy from a
> week ago, etc. without any trouble.
>
> I've also heard good things about Bacula, rdiff-backup, and Duplicity.
> Bacula, I understand, is well-suited for medium/large-sized corporate
> networks, so it should handle your higher server count pretty well. If
> you're going to back up 80 servers, though, I would recommend looking into
> deduplication technology to reduce the size of your backups (but
> recommending tools for that is a job for someone on the list who has worked
> in much larger environments than I).
>
> -Brian
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>



-- 
/** Shawn.Hartsock http://hartsock.blogspot.com/  //*/