Backing up very large server

[dellison]

Simple question for the guru's of OcUK.

We're putting together a large server at work - several TB's of Raid 6 array. All well and good - can survive an HDD failure, and still have another drive go down while recovering.

BUT -

What the hell do you do to backup 5, 6, 10 TB? Apart from building another machine with a similarly huge Raid array - are tapes a real option? We're in that difficult SME phase of being too small to have an IT guy, but need a massive jump in storage!

Doug

 

[rpstewart]

What's the rate of change of the data? Can you get away with incremental backups or will a full backup be needed each time?

My only experience with backing up that sort of volume is in large enterprise scenarios where we have Tivoli Storage Manager in place but huge automated tape libraries are probably beyond what you're looking for.

 

[kefkef]

I suppose you would need to answer the questions along the lines of:

What is the server going to be used for?
Is it suited to the purpose you are aiming for?
How valuable is the data on the server?
How would the business survive the loss of that data? Would it survive the loss of data?

There's nothing stopping you using tapes (LTO3 400/800gb or LTO4 800/1600gb), doing a full backup at the start or end of the week then doing incremental (i.e. only the changes made since the last full backup) backups every day in between, would mean you dont need so many tapes. Plenty of software around to do this. Otherwise i would look at why you need that much storage on the server, would a NAS/SAN not be a better solution using snapshot technology etc?

There's plenty of companies out there that would help you with this type of situation, yes, it may cost a few quid to get them in, but what is the cost of losing your data?