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Backups

My $20 Compaq Proliant server and RAID array does nightly backups on 4mm DAT tape. Since Im not home during the week and not generating files, it seldom needs an additional tape and it only backup changed files in several directories across the network.

Its only a 100mhz server with 30gigs in a 5 bay RAID, so it takes awhile to do the network backups, then write to tape, but its not like it has much else to do. Im thinking about using it as the firewall for the internet, but all I have is dialup, so it would be a bit slow when proxied.

Gunner

"I mean, when's the last time you heard of a college where the Young Republicans staged a "Sit In" to close down the Humanities building? On the flip side, how many sit in's were staged to close the ROTC building back in the '60's? Liberals stage protests, do civil disobedience, etc. Conservatives talk politely and try to work out a solution to problems through discourse until they believe that talking won't work... they they go home and open the gun cabinets. Pray things never get to the point where the conservatives decide that "civil disobedience" is the next step, because that's a very short route to "voting from the rooftops" Jeffrey Swartz, Misc.Survivalism

Reply to
Gunner
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You *really* don't want to put your server to use as the firewall as well. Part of the design for a firewall system is to limit the damage if the firewall is compromised. Would you rather just lose net connectivity until it is fixed, or also lose all of your files? (Or at least, have to scan everything there for backdoors and Trojans installed by whoever compromised the firewall.

A firewall *should* be a minimal system, so the potential intruder has the minimum tools to work with.

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

The same room? Two different locked rooms, widely separated in the building, would be better. The network doesn't (within reason) care, and physical separation improves your odds.

Are the tapes ever checked? Are they retired? Or just rotated?

Reply to
Ecnerwal

That won't help you a bit if the power supply smokes and takes all the computer electronics with it. It's happened to one of my employees.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

Once a week I "Ghost" my hard drive to a backup which is only powered up during the Ghost'ing. I have a toggle switch on the front of my case for the back-up's power. My intent was to protect against a virus that runs amok through all the drives, but this power-supply failure is another good reason. Bob

Reply to
Bob Engelhardt

Yes, 2 locked rooms would be better - but one locked is better than out in the open.

Tapes are checked at least monthly, and are rotated, not retired.

The use of monthly PERMANENT backups on CD makes retirement of the backup tapes less important.

Reply to
nospam.clare.nce

The amusing thing is that modern tapes have longer expected lives than CDROM's.

The tapes we use in our libraries (587 tape AIT1 and 399 tape LTO1 respectively) have a guaranteed 30 year archive life.

As it happens we don't use these systems for archiving, we use pairs of servers with raided SATA disks, with the servers on separate sites (20 miles apart) and mirroring software to keep the data mirrored using off-peak WAN bandwidth. This is actually cheaper than the cost of tapes!

Reply to
Mark Rand

I looked into a number of options for our small home network. I ended up getting a Linksys EFG-120 network access server, which comes with a 120 GByte hard drive. It uses removable drive trays, and I now have a second

120 Gbyte drive that the first one gets copied to periodically. This can be popped out & stored offsite, and a new drive plugged in. At less than $1 per Gbyte, the system was a LOT cheaper than any high capacity tape system I could find, and is VERY fast. I can back up my laptop (which has about 20 Gbytes on it) in under 20 minutes. My old DAT drive takes several hours to backup & verify less than half that much stuff.

Doug White

Reply to
Doug White

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