[nycbug-talk] backup server?

[Pete Wright]

Charles Sprickman wrote:

>
> I'm with you on the power thing, but that NetServer looks like it 
> probably sucks a ton of power when idle (lots of fans, over-speced 
> power supplies). If you've seen those $30 "Kill-A-Watt" things, they 
> are an eye opener if you go and measure all your boxes.  My G5 sucks 
> 247W under a nominal load.


yea upon further review you are defiantly correct.  what caught my eye 
was the tape drive and the ability to expand the disk array.

>
>> question with the sun's, any comments on running a spark with a dds 
>> tape drive on FreeBSD.  i've found this (which prolly doesn't save me 
>> much power, but it could double up as a mp3/avi NAS:
>
>
> Personally I've hated DDS tapes since I tried to pull a backup off a 
> two year old tape.  Nothing of use was left, it doesn't seem to be a 
> very long-lasting medium.  Once I free up some more space and shuffle 
> the home boxes around, I'm going to a disk-based backup like I do at 
> work.  No tapes to change, and if you go across two disks or use RAID, 
> it's not putting all your eggs in one basket.

yea i've kicked around the idea of disked based backup, but i am going 
to try to offline alot of my cruft that has built up over the years.  so 
i'm thinking tape is probably the best bet for that.  i've never had any 
issues with DDS myself, but thanks for the heads up.  if i end up with a 
dds drive i'll have to choose my stock carefully (and storage for that 
matter).

> To manage this at one client I'm using Flexbackup.  Very nice and 
> simple if you have from 2 to 2 dozen machines.  I run a two week cycle 
> and each cycle goes to a separate drive.  So if a drive on the backup 
> server dies, I lose at most two weeks.  You can shuffle this around in 
> any way you like.
>
> http://flexbackup.sf.net/

<quick plug for bacula>
yea i check out flexbackup looks pretty cool.  i've fallen in love with 
bacula myself.  seems to have the best mix of higend stuff (sql catalogs 
etc.) that i want to work with for my own purposes and it quite easy to 
setup.  anyway i would definatly suggest bacula to anyone, it is 
actaully a very nice package.
</plug>


So after looking around on ebay for a while i think i have a general 
idea of where i'm going to go with this.  it's either going to be a sun 
ultra 3 (in which case i will get the required scsi cards and external 
AIT drive which i have a line on) or an older compaq which has a builtin 
tape drive/raid etc...thanks for the input everyone it's actually 
helping me narrow down what i'm exactly looking for.


-pete

-- 
~~oO00Oo~~
Peter Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
www.nomadlogic.org/~pete
917.415.9866