[dba-Tech] Backup redux

[Jim Lawrence]

Hi Arthur:

The more data and the more important the data is, at least to you are the consumer, that more important a real backup system becomes. Truism, all drives fail and never have important data on a single device...this we are in complete agreement.  

This may be a good time to consider real redundancy. If Cloud backups are not a solution, due to cost of data transfer or cost of storage maybe a good NAS should be considered. The system that has been most totted, in tech circles is the FreeNAS/TrueNAS products. If there is an old box available, that can house, four or five (or more drives), exactly the same drives are recommended but a mixture of similar drives will suffice, this product can be setup. If properly configured, backup on this device, lost of data, barring complete destruction of your accommodations, will be a thing of the past.

It uses the FreeBSD OS with a ZFS (file system) that has been noted for unrivalled accuracy and reliability. It connects easily to all operating systems. All major companies are now using ZFS (...or they should.)  Example Microsoft.

Check the following out: http://serverfault.com/questions/47021/is-freenas-reliable on building a NAS on the cheap.

Here is one company that has a very successful business built on FreeNAS/TrueNAS and ZFS: https://www.ixsystems.com/ Even their smaller offers may seem expensive: https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini but put in context compared to the new Microsoft Book laptop, it starts to look like a bargain. ;-)    

But even better: Ubuntu has indicated that the next version of the product, coming out April-May, of 2016, will have a the option to change secondary drives to ZFS format. The primary and root drive will still be the standard FS but all other drives will be able to be formatted in ZFS. This means that there will be a very solid set of management tools built into the Ubuntu front end. I am very much looking forward to this new release and to the subsequent building of a virtually indestructible ultimately reliable data system, at a reasonable cost.  :-)

PS Sorry for your loss as we have all been there.

Jim


----- Original Message -----
From: "Arthur Fuller" <fuller.artful at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" <dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2015 10:56:32 AM
Subject: [dba-Tech] Backup redux

Yesterday I suffered a minor disaster. For years I've used an external USB
drive as the location of my backups. Yesterday that drive died.
Unfortunately, I also used that same drive to house my music collection.
Bad idea. Note to Self: an external drive devoted to BackUp should have no
other purpose. So now I'm going to buy another 2TB external drive, and
mirror everything of consequence.

Another lesson learned is that while developing various apps,. I would
create a directory off the root called c:\xxx, where xxx is something
meaningful. Another bad idea; should have placed these projects in the
default directory tree (My Documents), so they'd automatically be included
in the backups and I wouldn't have to remember that they were isolated from
the default backup strategy. Fortunately, I was able to recover, since I
also burned these projects of interest to a thumb drive. Actually, that's
not quite accurate; I did lose a few iterations of the data, but ultimately
that's ok since I'm developing the FE and BE as separate projects, and it
really doesn't matter that my BE data is old, since the data model has not
changed.

Long story short: I have moved all the significant data/directories from
their isolated locations, into the "Documents" folder. 'Twas a PITA but now
my arse is covered, I think.

Meanwhile I have to wait until the 28th to buy a backup^2 external drive,
but with luck, the system shall persist as is for at least that long.


Moral of the story: make sure that your backup drive has a backup; in the
ideal case, that would be on an adjacent box, or perhaps the cloud. Given
the size of my datasets (some over 50GB, and I have several of those), the
cloud seems impractical; so my only choice would seem to be a few external
1+ TB drives and to mirror everything. If you've a better strategy, I'd
love to learn it.

-- 
Arthur
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