[nycbug-talk] backup server?

[Charles Sprickman]

On Sun, 7 Nov 2004, pete wright wrote:

> hey ya'll thought i'd post this as a rfc type thing.  i've prolly gone for 
> too long w/o a home backup solution, which is kinda bad expecially 
> considering i try to help out on the bacula lists when i have time.  so i'm 
> asking around what you all have going on.  i'm kinda cheep when it comes to 
> electricity ($$ wise and environmentally) so i've been leaning to getting an 
> older intel type system or possibly an older sun.  (think those consume less 
> power than my current dual athlon workstation and dual G4 mac workstation).

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.

> 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.

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/

As far as the archiving methods, you can use dump, pax, afio, rsync, tar; 
just about anything you want.

Thanks,

Charles

> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=73324&item=5729969556
>
> anyone have a similar setup running on sun gear i should keep my eyes open 
> for?
>
>
> thanks!
> -pete
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