# Production Grade Backup (Gentoo Disaster Recovery Strategy)

## mog

Hi guys, I wondered whether any of you have experience with production grade backup architectures. I would like to know what is out there in the open source world apart from Bacula and Amanda that can be incorporated into a network wide disaster recovery strategy.

Things that such app would need to provide is:

-> network based client/server architecture

-> automatic and manual backups

-> no backup downtime

-> disk image backup

-> full and incremental file backup

-> bare metal as well as re-install and patch recovery

-> work off any ide, scsi, sata and raid configuration

-> support all major *NIX file systems

Things that would be nice if it did provide it:

-> capability to backup and recover heterogenous client and server systems (Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP, Linux, BSD and Solaris)

-> distributed storage and management of the backups (maybe in round-robyn fashion)

-> automated remote restore and recovery processes (limited to servers equipped with remote management facilities of course)

-> support of all major M$ file systems

the kind of thing I am after needs to be stable, production grade software.   :Wink: 

I know that you can backup stuff using a combination of tar, cron, ftp, sftp, dd, etc, but I do not need something to back up my home computer or server, but a larger number of mission critical servers and client machines on an organisation wide network. So it must address enterprise needs and scale well. Help, suggestions and past experiences are very much appreciated  :Very Happy: .

Cheers.

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## mog

Corrected the title  :Embarassed:  ... no one using anything the like?

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## butt3r

I was looking for an "all in one" backup solution as well.

All i could find are systems which do one or 2 things.For a complete backup solution like this you are probably gonna have to use a couple of different systems.(unless there is some software out there I havent found yet)

Simple example:

Like partiimage for the drive images(there are others)

a daily cron script for backup of important file directories that sends it to removable media or accross the network.

and then create your own recovery strategy from them.

Of course the stuff I was searching for would have to be open source.There may be some closed source systems out there I havent found yet that do all of this.

Also it seems(someone correct me if I am wrong)You will have some downtime when your imaging disks because you have to have the disk inactive so nothing is locking or writing to directories and files.All image software (that I have found)has you boot from a disk or cd and runs its own operating system so it can image the disk.

I tried the DD linux command to image a disk and it took several hours to create a full drive image.

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## mog

I have been looking a bit deeper into bacula and I think that together with rsync it may do the job for now.

I had a very extensive look around and there seems to be very little software that covers the whole lot. Especially if it should be something that is integrate enterprise level stuff ... unless of course you want to dig deep into your pockets to get some closed source stuff  :Razz: .

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## butt3r

From the Bacula website: http://www.bacula.org/

It comes by night and sucks the vital essence from your computers.

LOL you can tell these people like horror movies  :Very Happy: 

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## hw-tph

While it is not the definitive all-in-one package you seem to be looking for, mondo-rescue (in Portage) does a very good job of imaging and restoring. Look around the website - there are people that have very nifty cron jobs running to image critical data using mondo.

Me? I just use it at home, backing up the computers in the family.

Håkan

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## mog

Yes I know bacula and as far as I know it can do quite a lot too, but the recovery process for bare metal is not as streamlined as they would like it.

Mono Rescue looks very promising. 

I'll evaluate it over the weekend.  :Smile: 

Thanks a bunch  :Exclamation: 

Anything else out there?

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## pharoh

I work for a medium sized ISP and we use bacula and partimage together.  when a server goes into production we image it with partimage (we use partimage with network support to send this to our in house image server/bacula director machine.  We then use bacula to backup the day to day data.  I case of disaster we bring a new piece of hardware ( for us we use ALL supermicro racks so the hardware is similar but it really does not matter) and load the partimage on then tell bacula to restore data and plug it back in.  we can restore machines Verry quickly with this method and it is fairly simple to do.  yes we do do periodical partimage backups to incur all the configuration changes that were made.

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## MrUlterior

3 things: RAID + dd + rdiff-backup

RAID offers physical redundancy, I personally use RAID1 on 3 disk arrays for production servers. The server is initially imaged with partimage (as I think someone mentioned earlier .. )

However once a month on a Monday morning, I will physically pull the 3rd disk out of the array of each server and take them to the backup machine which'll dd & bzip2 them to a SAN array to ensure a more reccent image is available. 

mysqldump runs on each database server every 12 hours exporting all databases to a file on disk.

rdiff-backup is run every 12 hours an hour after mysqldump & backs up files to the SAN array.

Bare metal restoration is as simple as booting the fresh server with Knoppix, dd'ing the most reccent image onto the array. Rsync the file level backups to return everything to a state current within the last 12 hours (rdiff-backup support point-in-time type operations too .. )

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