Cool backup idea

[Asgorath]

Ok, to start this off, I have a bunch of servers at work. They have a bunch of data but the data does not change largely day to day. Every night I make a tape backup of the whole setup and rotate the tapes. The rotation takes a tape every month and moves it offsite for 1 year.

Now what I was thinking would be great is I have a very nice fileserver/ mythTV server at home that I've built up using RAID 5 and a crapload of big SATA drives. I have fibre to the curb. The work has 2x T1. Could I do some sort of incrimental backup over a SSL tunneled FTP connection to my home server and keep a full image over there? Have that scheduled so it will run every night? Then perhaps I can have a spare server at home that is equal to the servers at work.

I want a hotspare server that can take over any of the duties of the other servers. I need to think this out a lot more obviously, but wouldn't that suck if my work burnt down? All the servers would be cremated and I bet it would take me a solid couple of days to get new servers up and running.

Argh, diaster planning is tough. Can anyone link me to some good links on planning for diasters?

Thanks.

[drizzt81]

yes you could do that, but it obviously depends on how much data you have and the average amount of change. It also dependends whether your work likes the fact that their data is in a private home, where it is arguably easier accessible than at your work.

[Asgorath]

yes you could do that, but it obviously depends on how much data you have and the average amount of change. It also dependends whether your work likes the fact that their data is in a private home, where it is arguably easier accessible than at your work.

Well, being that it's my business I don't think the owners mind :-p

As for the data, I'd say there is about 150MB/ day of new data

[drizzt81]

Well, I did not know whose business it is (you did not say) and I felt compelled to point that out. In the end, security must be by design - at least that is what my professors think ;)


Back to the topic at hand. The options that you have available depends largely on what OS you are planning on running. Unhappy_Mage helped me get started on a similar idea in a Thread (http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1042633) but unfortunately I got sidetracked before it ever went into production.

If you are running WinXP, you can likely use Robocopy in addition to creating a VPN connection to replicate new files to the failover server in your house. If you are constrained more by BW than by CPU power using tools like rSync would be better, since their network usage is lower.

While I hate scheduled tasks in windows, due to the fact that they fail if the PC is not powered on while they are to execute, it is likely one of the easiest methods to script this whole process in a batch file or windows scripting host and then schedule that as a task. In Linux a cron job would do the same (I assume).

To start this whole endeavor off, I would consider to have a "bring the server to work" day and replicate it there once. Then you can go on and have the 150MB/ day updates running without having to transfer the inital amount of data.

Last but not least: if you are not using rSync, it is very important to keep the clocks of the two machines in sync, for these are used by Robocopy. I am sure that you can script "update time" in windows and in unix and have that occur before the actual transfer command.

If you end up with a heterogeneus system (Linux at home Windows in the office) that is 'read-only' at all times where there is no synchronization running, you should be a little more secure w.r.t. threats that target one platform specifically.

I am sure that you are aware that having such a 'fail-over' server at home is not really a backup, since it's online. As such, it is vulnerable to being compromised through the network. Of course, running a 'pretty tight and regularly updated' version of whatever OS you choose may be sufficient for your cause, especially when considering that you have off-site tape storage as well.

[unhappy_mage]

DeltaCopy (http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp) might be a better choice than Robocopy. It's designed for server/client stuff, rather than copying from one directory to another. It's also potentially more bandwidth-efficient - it can compress the data when it's going across the net. Combined with something like Hamachi (http://www.hamachi.cc/) for security, it's pretty simple to set up a backup system.

If I were to suggest a setup, I'd put Linux on the "home" machine, and leave Windows on the "work" one. Set up the service on the Windows one in read-only mode, set up Hamachi, and make sure that the service binds only to that adapter (add a line to %Program Files%\Synametrics Technologies\DeltaCopy\deltacd.conf that says "address 5.6.7.8" or whatever your Hamachi IP is...). Then, on the Linux machine, you can do anything that uses rsync, including the rather neat rsync snapshots (http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/) idea.

HTH

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