[PLUG] Suggestions for _really_ small business data backup

David Fierbaugh da6d.fierbaugh at gmail.com
Tue Oct 21 17:00:04 UTC 2008


Sounds like they're always doing full backups now. Have you considered
splitting the backups to a periodic (weekly) full backup, and more frequent
incremental backups?

How much data?
How fast does the data change?
Are they backing up pertinent data or shotgun backup of the whole/portion of
the filesystem?

Take a look at what the 'footprint of disaster' they need to be recoverable
from. For example, if the backup media is in the same computer, a single
failure (cup of coffee disaster) can make it go away; in the same room, a
small fire makes it go away; the same building.... ; the same city.... ;
etc.

Does the data need to be encrypted? How do you safely backup decryption
key(s)?

Where are the human bottlenecks? How many people know how to do backup? How
many people know how to restore?

There's always a lot of talk about the right tool(s) to do the backup, and
sometimes the process gets overlooked. If you have great tools in place, but
the process isn't well defined and implemented, then the system doesn't
work.



On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 8:52 AM, Roderick A. Anderson <raanders at acm.org>wrote:

> I have a customer that for years was able to do their backup by creating
> an CD ISO image (mkisofs) and burn it (cdrecord).  Over the last few
> months it has been failing off and on for no distinctly discernible reason.
>
> The next test is to replace the CD-RW drive but I've tried the process
> with an external CD-RW and still get the same kinds of results.
>
> Tape drives are too expensive and, in my experience, not always reliable
> without _lots_ of TLC.  In fact I moved them from tape backup in a
> desktop system, that had never been tested by actually restoring, to the
> CD-RW and it worked like a charm -- or several years.
>
> I'm considering SD or thumb/jump drives as they will hold all their
> foreseeable data needs or even Bakula over the network to an off site
> system.
>
> Are there other (_very_) inexpensive backup options?  Well besides hope
> and prayer.  :-)
>
>
> TIA,
> Rod
> --
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG mailing list
> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
>



More information about the PLUG mailing list