Data Backup Survey

Hey William,

Since I'm a database developer, and ALWAYS lecture my clients on the importance of a proper backup system, my solution may be a bit goofy.

Most of my work is on site at clients' offices, so the only time a backup is really important is for new clients -- during the initial development cycle. As I'm doing development, I create a backup every twenty minutes. I zip it all into one file, and have an AppleScript that automatically gives it a date and time-stamp as its file name.

Then at the end of the day, I take my most recent backup, and send it to my gmail account. Once a week I go in there and delete all but the most recent backup for each project.

I back up all my files on cd's and I do it each time I work in that particular file. I have first on my birthday wish list an external hard drive. Once I get that I will be taking my cd's off site for safe keeping.

Most of my critical data is being moved to databases on my server which each hour are incrementally written to IDB (intelligent disk backup). The intelligent part refers to the autonomics which manage the data rotation, thinning, etc automatically. The databases are replicated to workstations (encrypted of course) for offline access (and yet another backup copy).

Beyond that, I'm thinking of setting up an rsync service so I can push out another copy online.

So yeah, I have a pimp backup =)

William,

Right now I'm using Rsnapshot to make about 4 backups per day per server, for 150 servers. It's not a great solution ,not by a long shot, but it gets the job done. Being based around rsync, the real killers are our one of our social network customers, and one of our file sharing sites, both of which have 10s of thousands of small files, and the 3 or 4 operations that rsync does per file makes them somewhat unmanageable.

Once a day we sync our primary backup server to our second backup server (at the same datacenter). Twice a week we make a copy of that over to a backup server in Texas.

As for employee interaction, each backup generates a ticket to our ticketing system. That's one backup per customer, not per server :) The first task of one of my sysadmin's day is to review each ticket and look for errors. Moving forward I want to build a good system for verifying data and actually build processes to do monthly or bi-weekly data restoration tests.

The rsync encryption thing is a good question...that's why its still in the "thinking about" stage.

William,

We use a combination of RAID and external drives to keep the integrity of our data. For the web servers, we use RAID 5. For database servers, we don't use RAID, but nightly cron to external drives. Our development systems use RAID 1 and all source code stored in a SVN server. Our SVN server is mirrored to an external drive once a month. The only thing that is manual is the SVN server backup and can be made easier with cron I believe.

Right now, it take about 1 minute a month of human intervention to do backups. However, we are lacking protection from fire, flood, etc that takes out the entire office. An off-site backup solution is what we are missing.

this is what i have set up for some of my small office clients, as a beginnings.

I. target layer .Workstation(s)/Server

      >>>>>>>>
        II.  backup layer 1  at least a daily "backup to disk" of a RAID external NAS with a retention/overwrite period to be defined - (Maxtor One Touch is a cheap solution)
           >>>>>>>>
                III.  backup layer 2.  a "backup to Tape" rotated out weekly to an offsite secure locale. (many cost effective solutions here... DVD-RW, even)

For most small business owners (one to three workstations, maybe a central server) total out of pocket expense can be kept around a thousand(ish).

First off for local backups we use Backup Exec to 1TB tapes to do dailys of our servers. Then we use AmeiVault to do monthly online backups of everything (just in case everything goes up in flames).

Now if you have small amounts of data to backup (250Gb or less) John, last poster,has a very good solution. I would still look at periodic online backup to save for a catastrophic event.

Ok, so the Californian is paranoid about fires, earthquakes, theft, and rabid squirrels bent on industrial espionage. :)