[CLUE-Tech] Tape Drives - why?

[David L. Willson]

How about tgz's, just like you'd use on tape, only on disk.  You do a Full
on Friday, and Diffs (by modify-date, or however) every other day, and name
the files something like $server-$date-[full|diff].tgz

Use a disc large enough to hold a week's worth of backups, and enough discs
to make your rotation window as large as you want plus one, clone the active
backup disc to the "plus one" on Thursday night (after the backup), and
offsite the clone.

I'm gonna try it.  My money says I can still read the discs, and I still
have a means of un-TGZ'ing the files in 10 years.

-----Original Message-----
From: clue-tech-admin at clue.denver.co.us
[mailto:clue-tech-admin at clue.denver.co.us] On Behalf Of Eric Jorgensen
Sent: Friday, July 30, 2004 11:42 AM
To: clue-tech at clue.denver.co.us
Subject: Re: [CLUE-Tech] Tape Drives - why?

We've been talking about how to get around using tapes for backup by using
disks of various types.  I personally like firewire, and have several
external enclosures for large, cheap IDE drives to do my backups at home.
But, the problem for using a system such as this (or even larger) is that
sure, you can recover the data from the last rsync, but can you do a point
in time recovery?

Let's say that you have to go back to "last Tuesday, 'cuz I think I deleted
the file on Wednesday." 
Unfortunately, in our jobs, this does come up!  So if you're doing a simple
rsync, you've just rsync'd over the data you need.  It becomes more
difficult to keep multple copies of your backups online, but doable. 
But, even say the Network Applicance folks have "snapshotting" built in so
you can go to a particular date without a problem.

Just something to keep in mind.

Eric

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