Custom NAS device

[LuckyTaxi]

Anyone have experience building their own NAS device? We need another backup system in addition to our tape backups, which has been unreliable to say the least these past few weeks. Anyways, my colleague and I sleep better at night knowing everything at work gets backed up correctly. anyways, so i'm thinking of the following.

Build a custom box with 2-3 200GB hard drive. Load it with freebsd and 1GB of ram and use the TAR command to backup data from various servers. It wouldnt be the entire server, but just certain directories that either contain critical data such as ppl's work files and database files. I've successfully built a system using freebsd to rsync our mail/web server. However, we need a system to archive data for months. Tape backups are only good to a certain extent and administration wants to be able to retrieve data from prior months.

Media tapes cost way too much money so a couple of big hard drives would be much cheaper. We're still going to continue to run backups to our media tapes, but also looking to backup to another server.

We have 10 Windows 2000/2003 servers and 2 freebsd servers. Think it'll work?

 

[rmrf]

sounds like it will work depending on a couple of things:

1. roughly, how big is the backup from each server. from what I can remember, tar just backs up the files, and doesn't really have any sort of compression. not sure how reliable tar.gz is, but that may save you some space if you are not already doing that.
2. does your administration want backups to be saved a couple months back, for every day, or just a full backup every month or so?

 

[LuckyTaxi]

Originally posted by: rmrf
sounds like it will work depending on a couple of things:

1. roughly, how big is the backup from each server. from what I can remember, tar just backs up the files, and doesn't really have any sort of compression. not sure how reliable tar.gz is, but that may save you some space if you are not already doing that.

Isnt tar.gz file compression. I could just use .tar, but gzipping it would save some space.
I have to doublecheck tomorrow, but ALL our server have hard drives under 100GB. However, as I stated, I wont be backing up the entire hard drive. Certain directories are only my concern. I figure if a server crashes, we'll have to reinstall and we can restore the critical data, whether it's everyone's files or a database.

2. does your administration want backups to be saved a couple months back, for every day, or just a full backup every month or so?

I havent thought of the scheme yet, but more than likely I'll run an incremental and then a full backup every week. Archive those for maybe a month or two and then delete them after they "expire."

 

[rmrf]

Yeah, tar.gz is file compression, I just worded it dumb. Definitely gzip the files to save space. With the hard drives that you will be backing up to, will there be any sort of raid solution, or is it just a straight dump to have two copies (one on the server, and one on the backup server)?

I think it should be able to handle the scheme you have in mind. If for some reason you did run out of storage, how hard is it to add drives to freebsd? I guess just think about those types of things. If anything, if you have a spare desktop or other machine laying around, you could use it for a test server. doing that you would be able to gauge about how much time it would take for a backup to run, then calculate whether or not you have enough time for one machine to handle it.

 

[Nothinman]

Isnt tar.gz file compression. I could just use .tar, but gzipping it would save some space.

And it would also run the risk of losing the entire archive if 1 bit gets corrupted. It would be safer to gzip each file and then tar those up, although it's more work.

 

[rmrf]

I was wondering whether or not gzipping was riskier than tarring a file. I guess it makes sense, since with any type of compression you run a risk of having corruption.

 

[LuckyTaxi]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Isnt tar.gz file compression. I could just use .tar, but gzipping it would save some space.

And it would also run the risk of losing the entire archive if 1 bit gets corrupted. It would be safer to gzip each file and then tar those up, although it's more work.

wait so gzip and then tar? What am I doing now, tarring and then gzipping?

 

[Nothinman]

You're doing what you feel comfortable with. But if you gzip the tarball you have a greater chance of losing the entire thing than if you gzip each file individually then tar that up.

 

[Haden]

I would recommend taking look at dar.
Also, rar will give you both good compression and recovery records (and one can make non-solid archives, so single/several files can be extracted quicker)