[dba-Tech] Preferred backup method?

Steve,
I don't image to usb drives with the notion that it will be able to step in
for a failed SATA drive. I'm imaging to another SATA drive. I use an
external USB drive for standard file backups.

I did image my RAID 5 disk to a single drive and booted from it - it worked
like a charm.


And I did mean RAID 1 - strictly for speed.

The imaging of the RAID 1 drive(s) to a single drive (formerly part of the
RAID 5) would be sufficient to recover from in the event of a failure. 
But this scenario wouldn't work if the drives completely failed in the
middle of work, hmmm... I'll have to rethink this. Maybe I should scheduled
an hourly, simple file backup for current projects and email files.

Just stepping outside of the box... 

... but sometimes the box is there for a good reason.

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Steve Erbach
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 12:57 PM
To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Preferred backup method?

John,

Sorry for not checking this thread earlier.  Got downsized on Monday
and have been scrambling a bit since then...

>> I'm thinking of going to RAID 0 with the third drive as backup image
drive <<

You mean "RAID 1", don't you?  RAID 0 is just striping where RAID 1 is
mirroring.  That's what killed my client.  The guy who put in their
network really screwed the pooch by putting RAID 0 on the server
instead of at least RAID 1.

So when you said, "What do you think of this approach?", I say, "Not
much" if you're really using RAID 0 instead of RAID 1.

My biggest issue with image backups is: do they REALLY allow you to
take the backup drive and use it to boot from if your main drive goes
south?  I've got a RAID 1 on my PC for main storage and an ESATA drive
for backup.  Casper seems to do the job of backing up the entire
system and then incrementalizing the full backup so that it's
up-to-date without my having to have half a dozen archival drives like
I used to have with tape cartridges.  I used a system very similar to
yours for backup when I had tape drives...but now the only serious
alternative is an external drive.

I understand that ESATA gives you more security with image backups.
The evil genius network admin where I used to work (before Monday)
said that USB image backups don't necessarily put the boot tracks in
the right place.  I don't KNOW that that's the case, but he's pretty
damned sharp about this stuff.

Regards,

Steve Erbach
Neenah, WI
http://www.NeenahPolitics.com
http://www.TheTownCrank.com

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 1:46 PM, John Bartow <john at winhaven.net> wrote:
> Hi Steve,
> For my clients I recently switched from using Retrospect Backup (or CA
> ArcServe for some) to portable USB Drives (previously tapes) to using
> Acronis to do the same.
>
> I've kept the same backup unit rotation of Annual, Monthly, Weekly, Daily
> backups as I did with a tape system. One never knows how far back a
> corruption goes until one tries to recover from a corruption :o)
>
> I would imagine this scheme would work with any imaging software. I like
> Acronis because it is very robust and it can store the backups in zip
> format.
>
> I utilize ZipBackup for smaller peer to peer offices. It works well but
does
> not have imaging capabilities - strictly a file backup solution. Backup
> scheme is essentially the same as above with the exception that dailies
are
> done to another machine and only weeklies and above are taken off site.
>
> In my office I use the Acronis method from above.
>
> Given the problems I've recently had with my RAID 5 system, I'm thinking
of
> going to RAID 0 with the third drive as backup image drive. Every night I
> would set my Acronis to do a complete imagine of the RAID 0 so if anything
> failed I'd have an easy time by changing the BIOS to boot from the image
> drive rather than the RAID Array. Once I repaired the RAID Array I could
> image it back from the image drive and switch the BIOS back. What do you
> think of that approach?
>
> _______________________________________________
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