What to do to backup my webserver? raid? CDs? HDD?

[SnowPunk98]

For my webserver I wanna have my info backed up so incase my HDD crashes I have a backup I have 1 30GB right now and wanna know what the best way to backup would be, I could trade my 1 30GB for 2 15GB and set up RAID or backup on CDs or get the 2 15GB and back the info up on one of the 15GB and not use it what would be the best

 

[blstriker]

Raid 1 is good for hardware failure, but it doesn't prevent user error or software errors that might get propagated on both mirrored hard disks. 30 gigs is a lot to backup. I personally have the the files that I use once in a while burned on cd just once. The stuff that changes a lot like my website gets put on CD every week. Most likely, you'll only have a subset of your total data that needs to be backed up on a regular basis, the other stuff might only need to be backed up once since it doesn't change much.

Good luck!

 

[BreakApart]

For personal use i'd stay with the single 30Gig drive, and then use a 2nd removable drive for backup. Once everything is setup, patches, data, etc making a CD backup set is a great idea, then once a week use the removable drive to mirror your data onto, once it's mirrored remove the drive. This will also leave you the option of using (2) extra drives so you can rotate your mirrored drives every-other week.

blstriker also has a good point, if you set the system to backup only the new data you could use 1-2 Cd's per week. In the long run though if the HDD fails you still need a new drive, and then you'll have to restore ALL the CD's, first the backup set then ALL the new data CD's. With a removable mirror setup, pop one of the mirror drives into the old HDD bay connect it and off you go.

Good Luck

 

[RichardInLA]

I backup my LAN server's data to a large HD on another PC on the LAN. The backup program runs every day, at night, automatically, keeping the last 7 days of backups. Very convient and effective. Large IDE drives are now very cheap. The only "downside" of this approach, vs CD or tape, is that I can't take the backup media offsite, so I'm not covered in case of a fire.

 

[blstriker]

What program do you use to do your backups automatically?

 

[RichardInLA]

I'm using Veritas Backup Exec Desktop Pro 4.5. However, I'm actually using the "Task Scheduler" of Win 2K for automation. I would guess you could use just about any backup program you want and use the scheduler feature of your op sys.

Using Backup Exec, I define a "job" which specifies what I want to back up and the name of the archieve file, so I have a job name "Monday" which backs up to "Monday.qic", etc. When you specify when you want the job to run, it adds an entry to the Win 2K task scheculer, which is not a part of the backup program but is a standard part of Win 2K. So, the "Monday" job overwrites the "Monday" file, so I always have the last five work days. You can also use the Win 2K task scheduler for more scheduling options, such as "first Monday" of each month.