Production backup of RH servers to tape

[GT1999]

Setup:

Two Dell 2850 2x Intel Xeon 3GHz replicated servers running RedHat Enterprise Linux v4

Windows 2003 Server running tape backup drive

Options:
Manual dump and script to copy backup to tape. (rsync?)

Veritas Backup Exec (Windows Server central point w/ unlimited dumping from servers (eg, Linux)):
Manufacturer's part #: S180498-0LB000
$929 from ASAP Software
Includes 1 year of 24x7 support with full updates

I'm working on getting the $929 (MSRP) price down with CDW. ASAP Software won't go lower.

Veritas Linux agent (for RH servers, with imaging):
Manufacturer's part #: S180658-0LB000
$216.99 (down from MSRP of $344) from CDW
Includese 1 year of 24x7 support with full updates

 

[GT1999]

Walking through the server room, it looks like the setup is actually one of the servers is actually directly hooked up to the tape backup.

There is no windows server currently.

I'm thinking long the lines of a manual dump may be the best option.

 

[cmetz]

tar --label=`date` --sparse --preserve --exclude=/proc --exclude=/sys -cf /dev/nst0 /

My experience is that dumb, low-tech backup solutions are the best. Smart = burn your backside when things go south.

Of course, if you would like to spend a lot of money, Veritas will happily take it.

If you want a more commercial-like package, also look at Amanda.

 

[Nothinman]

tar is free and works extremely well. For a 'disaster recovery solution' you can get a copy of Knoppix and use that to restore the tape when necessary. As long as you have local tape drives (or one tape on another Linux box that you can dump to via scripts and ssh) I don't see a reason to spend any money on a backup solution.

Just remember to never use dump on Linux. Well, xfsdump is safe, but only because it uses DMAPI to access the XFS filesystem and not the block device directly like dumpe2fs does.