Anybody using "dump"/"restore" to a remote system?

[Christopher Murtagh]

On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Rick Thomas wrote:
>  From the total lack of response to this question, can I assume that all
> you folks out there in YDL-land never do backups?  What do you do when
> you loose a disk? Or do you just run everything RAID-5?
> 
> Seriously: How do you back up your YDL machines?

 My /home/ partition is an external RAID box running RAID 5. The (was NFS
now Samba) staff directory and web development get rsync'ed to our backup
machine that dumps to the central backup system on campus (a Veritas
product). The only other things I backup are /etc/ and some config files
(like /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf). For the OS and apps, I can
simply re-install/rebuild often faster than getting restores from tape.

 The web root on our central web server (also RAID 5) and our Postgres
database (pg_dump) are tar'ed/gzipped and date stamped so that we can go
to any date within the last two years and see exactly what any page was
like and the data structure. These are also sent to the Veritas system.
Our 10k web pages, the data structure that goes with them and the code
that runs the CMS (PHP and Perl) can be tar/gzipped into less than 60 MB.

Cheers,

Chris

--
Christopher Murtagh
Webmaster / Sysadmin
Web Communications Group
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec
Canada

Tel.: (514) 398-3122
Fax:  (514) 398-2017