backups

[Richard Pieri]

My two rules of thumb are:

1. Use the native backup mechanism for the file system.  Other tools around that, like Amanda, are fine, but use the native backup mechanism to ensure that you get all of the file system.

2. Keep it simple.  Remember, not only do you have to do backups, you also have to restore them.  The simpler the system, the simpler that disaster recovery will be.

Currently I'm using a mix of backup systems.  The primary is AFS's native backup for home directories.  It's about 300GB of data on the live system.  And we have a heavy duty vault for tapes for a number of reasons instead of off-site storage.

The secondary is for servers.  Depending on the nature of the server it's either a week's worth of tar files or rsnapshot-based backups.  Both are to a large file server with RAID 1.  I'm not sure off-hand how much data this is.

--Rich P.