Tape Backup Solutions

[LiamC]

I wish. No. A lot of this stuff would be required for audit purposes. And its a two way street, they have a lot of incoming stuff

 

[Mercutio]

1. Saving business email is a bad idea unless someone is making you.
2. I'd shoot anyone who sent me 5MB emails regularly. Really. Shoot. That's completely abusive if that traffic is going out to the wider internet.
3. So... they need to refine their practices. Email a link to a web site. Don't have a web site? Hm. Better find a webspace reseller. Seriously.
4. Tape drives and media costs for small business remain extremely unappealing.
5. I've been working with Seagate DDS4 drives - priced around $500USD for backup. In practice I've found that the tapes will hold about 25GB. Most everything that gets backed-up nowadays seems to be pre-compressed.
6. DDS4 tapes are cheap, under $20USD.
7. Once they start to exceed 20GB/backup, you're boned.

I *HATE* the idea of backing up a hard disk to another hard disk, for a business, but Maxtor and Iomega both make products that are clearly along those lines (see my review in, er, some other thread), and you can buy a lot more storage for your US$500 by going that route.

 

[honold]

...I *HATE* the idea of backing up a hard disk to another hard disk, for a business...

why?

 

[blakerwry]

number 2 and 3 are the smartest things i've heard all week.

 

[Fushigi]

Exchange (and Domino for that matter) only store one copy of a message on the server regardless of how many people it is sent to. Everyone who sees it in their in box is actually just seeing a link to the message unless they're replicating the messages to a local PST file.

PST files can be compressed by Outlook/Exchange, although I don't know the nature of the compression -- whether it just defrags the holes created by deleting messages or actually reorgs things & runs an LZH or somesuch over the contents.

Scan eBay for a used AIT1 drive that comes with a few tapes. SCSI, 25GB-35GB uncompressed per tape, reliable, fast @ 4MB/sec uncompressed. Since it is older (AIT2 & AIT3 are out now and AIT4 will be around year end), AIT1 drives should be pretty cheap. The format is backwards-compat so if they upgrade to AIT2 or 3 in the future, tapes can still be used. See http://www.aittape.com/

If they're really growing, SAIT does 1.3TB/tape with compression. :lol:

Otherwise I agree with Merc's list, noting that I would shoot to maim & not to kill. At work we don't allow attachments over 5MB.

- Fushigi

 

[Mercutio]

...I *HATE* the idea of backing up a hard disk to another hard disk, for a business...

why?

I don't think of hard disks as reliable media for long term storage. Even mid-term (1 year-ish). I have drives that are approaching their 16th birthday that still work. I also have drives that didn't live two months and I see the trend heading more toward the latter.
Drives are GENERALLY not portable. Which means they aren't going off-site when they need to. Repeat after me: Keeping off-site backups might be a PITA, but sometimes, it's a very good thing.
Drives get used for other things. Invariably, someone with a little knowledge will say "There's that huge drive sitting out there, not being used for anything..." and all of a sudden there's 60GB of MP3s in your backup space (I've had this happen to me). Note that if the drive in question is portable, this problem is both more likely and greatly compounded.
Drives as a backup tool get misused. Backups are in part archives of a past state. When you have a direct-access file system, there's a real temptation to just copy over files that should be backed up, which is great, until you do the same thing again, and again, and again, and you're left with only one "previous state". Hope nothing goes wrong with the only copy you have.

 

[Handruin]

Could you do a NAS solution and then run a tape backup of the NAS to keep the traffic off the exchange server? Perhaps have a dedicated NIC in the exchange box used to connect to the NAS.

 

[blakerwry]

that's what i was thinking when i made my post

 

[LiamC]

NAS is way out of my depth Handruin. I might list it as an option though. I won't be actually doing the work.

 

[James]

I think you'll find it's impossible to back up Exchange's files while it's running, unless things have changed in 2000. So unless you want to stop the Exchange service while you back it up - and given that the data is large this means stopping the service for potentially several hours, not a great idea even in the middle of the night.

Of course Microsoft may have fixed this problem. But certainly until recently the only mail servers I knew of that allowed you to back up the mail files while they were running were Post.Office and SIMS.

Obviously you can use something like a Network Appliance filer which automatically generates snapshots, and back things up that way, but this is way outside the budget I would say.

 

[Mercutio]

IIRC, your major backup vendors have modules for backing up exchange now. Legato Networker does, at least. I have an exchange server at work that I maintain by the simple expedient of not backing up at all. Works fine for me!

 

[honold]

Exchange (and Domino for that matter) only store one copy of a message on the server regardless of how many people it is sent to. Everyone who sees it in their in box is actually just seeing a link to the message unless they're replicating the messages to a local PST file.

or unless the admin has used exmerge to repopulate the database because of corruption. for larger installations, this is almost a necessity at some point in the db's lifetime. i'd say i have about a 40% must-use-exmerge rate after about 2 years of uptime on e5.5/e2k

 

[honold]

I think you'll find it's impossible to back up Exchange's files while it's running, unless things have changed in 2000. So unless you want to stop the Exchange service while you back it up - and given that the data is large this means stopping the service for potentially several hours, not a great idea even in the middle of the night.

ntbackup could always do live exchange backups, as could any exchange-aware serious backup solution like veritas or tapeware

 

[honold]

i have lots of remote servers and lots of consulting clients. most of them use small business server 2000. i back up to a 160gb maxtor 5400rpm disk m/t/w/t/f and every other saturday, and a tape is only used for offsite storage once per week (or an additional/alternative offsite backup via unison/ssh to one of my servers).

i absolutely hate tapes - i find their only value is their portability. not their reliability, not their speed. unless it's an ultrium, which i have, but small/medium businesses can't justify that kind of cost.

 

[blakerwry]

Easy backups were one of the things i loved about Mdaemon (mail server i used in NT4).. all files kept in a central location.. easy to backup while it was running... could be backed up locally or remotely... restoring a backup of the server settings and email to the same system or even another system took all of 15 seconds(only a few users and a few thousand emails).

I was wondering myself the best way to backup email stored on my linux server... i think all mail is stored in a Mail folder in each user's home directory... SMTP server and IMAP server settings are stored in seperate places... makes it quite a bit more challenging to do a complete backup.

 

[honold]

tar works fine

 

[blakerwry]

yeah, i figured i'd use that on my account... but I'm wondering if there's some type of script i can do that will backup everyone's mail.. and possibly server settings (could be seperate from mail).. but i';d like to make it a script... and as simple as possible...


can I do something like:

# tar -cfWzv backup.tar /home/*/Mail

-c = create new archive
-f = use archive file
-W= verify archive after it's written
-z = compress with gzip
-v = verbose (list all files processed)

 

[honold]

add p to retain permissions (you'll do the same when you extract...tar zxvpf)

 

[blakerwry]

lol, ima doof, but thanks for your help honold

 

[honold]

np

you mail is stored in ~/Mail for every user?

you may wanna name it .tar.gz or .tgz to show you gzipped it...

 

[Mercutio]

That's pretty typical if you're using WU IMAPd. Or you could be lazy and leave everything in /var/spool like I do at home. Makes backups a bit easier.

 

[blakerwry]

np

you mail is stored in ~/Mail for every user?

lol, no it isn't. That's why im a doof... it is stored in a single location.. i was just thinking ... in a weird manner....

btw, I figured out that the 'f' flag had to be placed last (or right before the archive's filename anyway) otherwise you end up not creating an archive file.

you may wanna name it .tar.gz or .tgz to show you gzipped it...

I'm sure that one would have me stumped for days...

 

[blakerwry]

That's pretty typical if you're using WU IMAPd. Or you could be lazy and leave everything in /var/spool like I do at home. Makes backups a bit easier.

yes, I found out that my mail actually does seem to be in /var/spool/mail/

maybe I need to make sure it's all in one location... could some of it be spread out across the two places?

oh crap, i think it is spread out....

everything in the "inbox" is in /var/spool/mail/, while everything in the other folders is stored in the users home directory.... blah...

 

[Mercutio]

That's how it should be, blake.

You should backup /home anyway. It's like backing up \documents and settings on a Windows machine. Everything user-created should be there (including mail folders).

 

[honold]

mail folders will only be there if they're using local mail clients - odds are these are just remote pop3/imap users, right?

 

[honold]

i guess if he does have public access to uw-imap they will be stored in ~...but people REALLY shouldn't use uw-imap on public servers

 

[blakerwry]

Right now there are like 4 users of the server... it's not a public mail server(is there such a thing?)... I use IMAP and SMTP only.. pop is not running.. all users are remote.

Merc, I know that backing up /home is important as well, but I guess I'm just used to backing up mail serperate from everything else...

my /home directory has all users, plus for ease of organization/backup I put my virtual hosts in there as well (even though they are not defined as users but could be).

If my /home directory won't fit on a CD, what's the best way to back it up? tar to 700MB spanned files and burn to CD?

 

[Handruin]

NAS is way out of my depth Handruin. I might list it as an option though. I won't be actually doing the work.

NAS devices are generally intuitive when it comes to setup. Plenty of them are web driven and you can setup all types of volumes in RAID configurations. For security reasons I was recommending a direct connect from the host to the NAS devices, this way you won't have to put it out on a public network (if it even exists).

In another thread I was considering the purchase of this device. It's a simple stand-alone NAS unit made by quantum.

Typically at work I remember my coworker who tests a product call TEIM. (Timefinder/Exchange integration module)

Read more info here

We use a special device called a BCV (business continuance volume). These devices are like normal storage volumes except they are used to synchronize with production volumes.

The program then issues an I/O freeze (A Microsoft function I believe) and takes a snapshot in time of the database by splitting the synchronized pair of devices. If you have 15 BCV's available, you would use timefinder to schedule snapshots at different intervals keeping your database and exchange server protected at high levels. At the same time you can have a second storage array that contains a real-time mirror of the production volume in case of a building disaster like 9/11.

 

[honold]

http://www.powerquest.com/v2i/

 

[ddrueding]

So Mercutio has got me thinking about tape backup systems. The total amount to backup is ~15TB. What systems (hardware and software) should I be looking at? I already have a backup on drives, so all I would need to do is copy that directly to tape. No special DB, VM, or Exchange clients to deal with.

 

[Mercutio]

You're going to have to look at library systems, not single drives. You'll find that your mid-range library system will be either an 8-bay or 16-bay changer that will fit in a 1U enclosure. You'll connect it to a SAS controller and the library's full function will be fully supported by only some subset of available backup products.

I use (sigh) Backup Exec with mine.

 

[ddrueding]

You're going to have to look at library systems, not single drives. You'll find that your mid-range library system will be either an 8-bay or 16-bay changer that will fit in a 1U enclosure. You'll connect it to a SAS controller and the library's full function will be fully supported by only some subset of available backup products.

I use (sigh) Backup Exec with mine.

Thanks. I have some experience with Backup Exec and understand the sigh. If you had the choice, who would you use for hardware and software?

 

[Mercutio]

I had to become familiar with BE to help out a friend anyway. It's fine. Kind of.

There are a bunch of different tape libraries out there. Dell and HP and Tandburg and several other companies make them. The distinctions are pretty minor. There are also larger library systems, but they don't exactly show up used on Craigslist, either.

I certainly wouldn't mind if Acronis worked with tape libraries. It doesn't.

 

[Pradeep]

15GB? LTO 3 or 4 autoloader. Often times tape price will exceed library cost once you get a couple of generations backed up.

Don't forget the cleaning tapes, a barcode reader capable version and suitable labels can help things out as well.

 

[CougTek]

15GB?

Change that G for a T and you'll be closer to what he needs.

 

[Mercutio]

I've found LTO4 tapes for as little as $19 each.

 

[MaxBurn]

I've found LTO4 tapes for as little as $19 each.

I know nothing about tapes for backup.

Wiki says 800 GB each native and a "2:1" compression available? What if what you are backing up is already compressed?

The real thing that breaks it for me is something like the Quantum Superloader library goes for around $3~4k. And that seems to handle either 8 or 16 tapes? Will that handle 15TB?

I'm just thinking I can get a lot of hard drives for that cost. Must be cheaper when you get a lot bigger than that though.

 

[Mercutio]

I've never bothered to turn on compression. It would be a waste of time.
I have two backup jobs that are ~13TB and 8.5TB right now. I make a new full backup monthly and just do incremental backups on a weekly basis. It's not a huge deal.

I was able to get my Tape Library from a shuttered business through Craigslist, and I anticipate that in the long run I'll have a substantial savings versus buying more and larger disks on an ongoing basis, especially when I'm purchasing those drives just for redundant copies of things.

 

[ddrueding]

So from either Dell or HP, new, I'm looking at ~$6k for the library, tapes, software, and interface. What would your confidence be in the used market?

 

[Mercutio]

I got my library off Craigslist.
Take a look at Provantage for the hardware. As I recall they were hundreds cheaper than some of the other usual suspects.