Gustav Brock
Gustav at cactus.dk
Fri Feb 16 08:22:55 CST 2007
Hi Mark One cheap method could be (we have not yet tested this in full) is to use *nix standard util and protocol, RSync. Look up the thread last month at AccessD: Linux file server backup One issue we've noticed for backup from Win to FreeNAS is, that high ASCII characters (which our US friends call "accented" or "foreign") are replaced with underscore. As the preservation of the file content probably matters more than exact filenames, you may be able to live with that, indeed considering the cost: 0.00. For a Windows fail-over system, you have Sunbelt Software's Double-Take, but it's the kind of software where pricing is not advertised on the web site. /gustav >>> marklbreen at gmail.com 16-02-2007 15:02:29 >>> Hello John Colby, This is something that keeps me awake at night also, i.e., what to do if the motherboard goes down. I have a machine, with Raid 10, so I have stripe performance and raid redundancy but if the motherboard (or PSU for that matter) does down, I would have down time. So, in my mind, the only real choice is to have some kind of clustered machines, but this is something that I have only looked at, I have not actually gotton around to creating a cluster of machines. And I wonder what the performance would be like on such a system. Plus to build a cluster on Windows environment, you have to use W2k3 Ent edition. I have the software but licences only to use them in a dev environment, not real production environment. I would not like to assume that if I pulled my raid controller out and put it in another machine, that it would work, in fact, I sort of assume that it would not work. In summary, I have, redundancy with the disks, and backups of the data, but no redundancy with the machine itself. The data that I need to backup is about 40 GB, so what I am considering is 1) continuing to do my mag tape backups nightly and taking fridays off site in case of fire or theft or flooding etc. Then I am thinking of writing a small script to copy the 40 gb nightly to another server, I would probably have an A and B folder on the live backup server, so that when it is overwriting folder A, B is still nice and safe. Additionally, of the main file server ever goes down, I do not have to panic about the last tape backup possibly having failed. In summary, the real secret is to get redundancy of the raid array, I am looking forward to hearing if you acheive this. Finally, as I write this, I have just remembered something. The file server that I am using actually had the raid controller on board, so that means that if the motherboard goes down, I am 99% likely to loose the array..., now I will not sleep. Let me know how you get on the with controller pluging and playing in another machine, Mark