"Jason Bleazard" <dml@bleazard.net> wrote:
: On Sun, December 11, 2005 7:23 pm, jon@dakota-truck.net said:
:> Terrible Tom <SilverEightynine@aol.com> wrote:
:> Actually, I would have done
:> backups but couldn't find an affordable solution. The size of hard drives
:> has completely outstripped the backup medium industry's ability to provide
:> even remotely affordable alternatives. Probably the "best" thing out
:> there for home users right now as far as size/price goes would be burning
:> to DVD, but even a 250GB hard drive would require over 50 DVDs - it just
:> isn't a viable option.
: Actually, running backups to another hard drive is a pretty good way to do it.
: You just have to be careful about how you have it set up and think of what
: kinds of things can cause data loss, and how likely they are, and decide
: whether you want to run the risk. For example, you *could* simply drop a
: second drive in the same machine, which would protect you against drive
: failure and accidental file deletion. But if you get a virus or hacker, then
: it can wipe out your backups just as easily as the rest of your data.
Yep, I think also some types of hard drive failure can also damage
other drives on the same bus, so that's something to think about too.
The "backing up to another hard drive" I didn't really consider as a
viable option for me simply because I don't have the space in the case
for another hard drive; I'd have to go the external USB route. Which is
certainly a possibility, but the thought of having to buy one hard
drive for each one that I wanted to back up along with a USB case for
each one seemed a bit daunting for my particular situation. I was more
looking for a solution that I could just dump data too without having to
worry so much about how much free space was left on the backup medium, etc.
[...]
: I've been thinking of doing a backup server some time in the future. Here are
: a few thoughts, take them for whatever they're worth. You might want to
: seriously consider hardening it. Make it so that the other machines on the
: network can't even see that it's there (no NFS or SMB exports, ssh access
: only), run the backup process on that machine, and have it pull the data in
: from around the network. If one of your other machines gets a virus or
: hacker, then it won't be able to delete all of your backups as well. If you
: have a network drive mapped to the backup machine, then it's pretty easy to
: erase your backups.
That's basically the way I have it set up; the backup server pulls
the data off of windows shares. As you say, that doesn't get the registry
(although perhaps I could do a registry data dump to a file), and it
also misses some files due to "sharing violations/file in use", etc. but
most of those are system files. I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that
if my main OS hard drive goes out, I'm going to need to re-install. I've
got that pretty much down to a science by now though, so it isn't as
much of a hassle as it might seem.
I haven't really done anything to try and hide the backup server,
although it doesn't export any shares or anything.
: If you haven't already, it might also be worth thinking about physically
: locating the machine someplace other than the rest of your equipment. In the
: unlikely event you had a fire, or flood, or theft, then you wouldn't want to
: have everything together.
That's a thought. I'll keep that in mind and see if an obvious
solution prevents itself. Currently, some of the computers are in
the house, and the others are in the barn, there isn't really any other
place to put the backup server, so if the house or the barn burns
down, then *something* is going to get lost, either way. Guess I
need to build another barn for my cars, and put the backup server
out there too. ;-)
:> The majority of the professional IT world would scoff at that,
: How do you think all of these online backup businesses work? (BTW, did Josh
: send you that LiveVault video?) It's actually a pretty good idea. Tapes are
: pretty unreliable in my experience, and CDs and DVDs are anything but perfect.
: Hard drives are inexpensive and much faster. The main advantage of removable
: media is that you can take it someplace safe, which is why you have to think
: about how to mitigate the risks if you're going with a disk solution.
Yeah, when I was the sysadmin for the CS dept. at the college, I set
up a backup plan that essentially had 4 complete backup data sets that
rotated, and one set I kept at my house, which was rotated in at
the appropriate times. But, the cobbler's son goes without shoes, the
sys-admin's computer goes without backups... ;-)
:> scrounging parts and such from e-bay and buying some refurbished and new
:> stuff, I've just put together a ~1.3 TB (after formatting) backup server,
:> and have started doing some initial backups to it; once I get everything
:> set up, I'll automate the process.
: Nice! Just out of curiosity, how do you have it set up? I might get some
: good ideas for when I decide to do something similar.
I found a Dell PowerEdge 4100 on E-bay for about $70. It was a
dual PPro 200MHz with dual, redundant 700W power supplies and a 6 bay
hot swappable SCSI backplane. Running SCSI was out of the question due
to cost, so the plan was to convert it to IDE using PCI controllers.
The 18" cable limitation of standard (parallel IDE) didn't work due
to the large size of the case and the configuration of the motherboard in
relation to the drive bays, so I went with SATA in order to be able to
use 1 meter cables. I bought a couple of Promise TX2 4 port SATA controllers
and 6 refurbished Western Digtal 250GB hard drives. Unfortunately, the
Promise cards didn't play nice with the motherboard's BIOS, but I found a
motherboard out of a PowerEdge 4200 which I knew would work with the cards.
As a bonus, its got dual PII 366MHz processors now. Anyway, with a little
fabrication, I was able to mount the SATA drives in the SCSI enclosures, and
make everything play nicely together. I'm using Linux's software RAID
feature to create a 1.5 terabyte RAID0 partition out of the six 250GB
disks. (Which reduces in size to about 1.3 terabytes after formatting.)
I considered going the RAID5 route, but the 250GB was more important to
me than the redundancy. This isn't a mission critical server after all,
its just "disposable" backup storage. If the RAID array dies, I just need
to recreate it and then do my backups again. I used 250GB drives because
I got a very good price on them, they are currently the best price per
gigabyte. However, if I need additional space in the future, I do have
room in the case to build a custom rack to add at least 8-20 additional
hard drives, depending on how I built the rack.
I'm using Samba's smbtar to pull the data from windows shares to backup
the data. I wrote a shell script frontend which allows me to create
either full or incremental backups, and once I figure out what sort of
schedule I want, I will automate everything via cron. The full backups
are something of a killer over my 10 Mbit network since some of them
are 250-300GB in size, but that doesn't need to be done very often since
the much smaller incrementals will pick up the slack. I'm thinking I
might set it up to do a full backup only once a month, (maybe even longer
for some shares that don't change very often like my MP3 collection) and
the incrementals will probably be small enough to justify doing even on a
daily basis.
I haven't kept a close eye on the cost, but I have been frugal in my
purchases, and if I added everything up, I think it would come out to
somewhere around $800 for everything. Not chump change to be sure,
but for "1.5 terabytes" of storage running on server class hardware I
don't think I can complain too much. :-) Knowing what I know now, I
could have shaved some corners here and there, but I didn't do too bad
overall. A lot of it comes down to finding the right equipment at the
right price (ebay). :-)
:> I'm still trying to decide wether or not to send the hard drive out
:> to a professional service to try to recover the data, but that option
:> is still giving me a bad case of sticker shock. :-( (If anybody knows
:> of a good service with a good price, I'd appreciate a pointer!)
: The place we took ours for a quote was certainly not cheap, but they did have
: good service. They didn't charge us anything for the quote, and even
: recommended that we probably wouldn't want to have them do the recovery due to
: the price. I can look it up if you wanted. If it's something easy, they can
: sometimes get data back pretty inexpensively (although "easy" usually means
: the drive still works and you just deleted your partition table or something
: else they can get back with a sector editor).
Yeah, I wish it were something that easy. With the click of death
though, I'm assuming its going to need to go into the cleanroom.
I'm thinking about contacting the place that Josh mentioned (thanks, Josh!)
I actually had come across their web site when I was surfing for these
types of outfits, but had passed them by because they didn't have any
pricing listed, and I figured the standard rule of "if you have to ask, you
can't afford it" would apply. :-) The price that Josh mentioned though
doesn't sound too bad, all things considered. For the price of shipping
there and back, its probably worth having them take a look at it.
--
-Jon-
.- Jon Steiger --- jon@dakota-truck.net or jon@jonsteiger.com -.
| 67 Dodge Coronet, 70 Plymouth Barracuda, 76 Peugeot TSA |
| 78 Dodge B100, 90 Dodge Dakota Convertible, 92 Dodge Ram 4x4 |
| 96 Dodge Dakota, 96 Suzuki Intruder 1400, 96 Kolb FireFly |
| 99 Jeep Cherokee 4x4, 2001 Dodge Ram 3500 CTD |
`--------------------------------- http://www.jonsteiger.com --'
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