FreeBSD backup on a hard drive
I'm setting up a web-server that will be co-located at a data center. The server will have a RAID 5 array, and I need to back it up. Since the tape-based backup would be rather expensive to operate (the hosting company would charge an outrageous amount of $ for tape rotation), I'm thinking of setting up a hard drive based backup. I'm not expecting the total amount of content in the array to exceed 10Gb or even 5Gb for quite some time, so a separate 60 gig drive should be able to easily hold about 10 most recent daily backups.
I'm wondering what would be the most effective way of going about setting it up, particularly from the point of view of having to rebuild the system in case of a crash. The server will be running FreeBSD.
mairving posted this at 11:24 — 14th August 2001.
They have: 2,256 posts
Joined: Feb 2001
Ville, welcome to Webmaster-Forums.
Backup to another hard drive on the same system is one way of doing things but your best bet would be to keep a backup off site as well. To do an offsite backup you could tar and gzip it like so:
tar cvf - filenames | gzip > file.tar.gz #to compress into tar.gz. Of course, if you did this it would be quite a bit to download to your system but of that 5-10GB of space how many files are static and how many change. The point is again to have an offsite backup.
Other local backup options like dump and such are listed here on FreeBSD's site.
Mark Irving
I have a mind like a steel trap; it is rusty and illegal in 47 states
Ville posted this at 04:52 — 16th August 2001.
They have: 2 posts
Joined: Aug 2001
Thanks for the reply! I'll have to consider the options once I have the system (physically) up and running. Most likely I'll do a combination of both: take frequent (daily) full backups on a local separate hard drive, and back up critical files off site once a week.
From the recovery standpoint, if the RAID array goes bad, and I have a full backup of the system on a local hard drive, how difficult is it to recover the system once the RAID array is back up and running (but assuming that all the data on it was lost)? The OS probably has to be reinstalled (on the array), or can I just install the boot block on the array, refer to the backup, and go from there?
(Yes, I'm very green in administering a FreeBSD - or generally UNIX - box, but I'll learn quick
).
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