Backup devices - idea

[bronto]

Here's an idea - maybe someone with experience can comment on it.

I'm thinking I may be able to get the best of all worlds by using 
removable/swapable hard drives as my media.  They're fast, reusable, 
large capacity, and relatively cheap.  According to my inquiries, 
about as cheap per gigabyte as tapes, so I could even archive them 
and not re-use them if I were so inclined.  My questions are: 1) 
Reliability - in theory if treated with respect they should be as 
reliable as permanently installed HD's, but is that realistic, 2) 
will they be hot-swappable in linux?  Will I have to manually mount 
the drive everytime they are rotated (daily)?  I know they don't have 
to be on Windows or Mac, but Linux? and 3) Compatibility - will using 
these drives throw a curve ball at standard backup utilities?

TIA

Rob


>On May 31, 2002 08:19 pm, Bill Fink wrote:
>>  On Fri May 31 2002, bronto wrote:
>>  > I do like the idea of the useable and cheap media, but the low
>>  > capacity is a turn off.  This will be for a remote server and I don't
>>  > want to have an administrator standing there swapping disks just to
>>  > complete a full backup.  Unless you see a way around that, what are
>>  > the second choices?
>>
>>  If you have a reasonable size network pipe, how about rsync to a disk
>>  on another machine.  Once the initial backup is made, the subsequent
>>  incremental deltas might not even be all that large.  Of course take
>>  proper security precautions like making the server data read only to
>>  rsync, restrict access to only the backup system, and use an rsync
>>  password.
>
>I use mondo (http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/) on all my remote machines. It
>creates bootable iso images which can be burned onto cd, put onto tape,
>rsynced, ftped, etc. I make one system iso, burn it to cd, and create a
>weekly iso of /etc, and a daily iso of /var/www. Then rsync these to a remote
>location. Works great if theres a fire, and all hardware  is destroyed you
>can still be back up in a few ours. Provided you can find a location of
>course ;-).
>
>--
>Neil Jolly
>
>(with Yoda-like voice)
>"Confrontation leads to anger...  Anger leads to fear...  Fear leads
>to using Windows NT in mission-critical combat systems...  And this is
>how the ancients fell...
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