 | | | Hard drive failure recovery | Hard drive failure recovery 2005-03-16 - By Benjamin Franz
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On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, Hambleton, John S. wrote:
> Hello:
>
> Wonder if some experienced RedHat admins can give me some advice.
> We have a small departmental IBM eServer with three 18gb hard drives
> (this small machine can hold only three):
> sda1: /boot ext3
> sda2: /swap
> sda3: / ext3
> sdb1: /usr ext3
> sdb2: /home ext3
> sdc1: /var ext3
> sdc2: /tmp ext3
>
> The OS is RHL release 3 Taroon update 4. Grub is the bootloader.
>
> These drives have not been mirrored. Backup is to an IBM LTO tape drive
> with "tar". This LTO device requires IBM drivers that are not compatible with
> the
> most recent kernel for this OS.
>
> My question is what might a more experienced admin do to ensure quick
> recovery on this particular system should a hard drive ever fail? Is taking
> a snapshot of each hard drive with Norton Ghost an option? A different
> backup methodology? Other ideas?
Setup a second box (an inexpensive desktop class PC is sufficient) with a
pair of large-but-cheap IDE drives in a software RAID1 and use an
rsync-over-ssh backup solution. Total hardware cost for 300GB of RAID1
backup space would be under $1000 US. There are several free software
rsync backup packages that can even handle tower-of-hanoi rotation. See
http://www.linux-backup.net/App/
I rolled one for our own use from scratch that does 7xdaily, 4xweekly,
3xmonthly, 2xquarterly efficiently with hard linking to conserve space. It
fully backs up more than 20 servers with more than 300 GB of total data in
some millions of files every day - half of them over only 1/2 T1
bandwidth.
If you just want to be able to 'plug in the drives' to the old system for
maximum recovery speed, setup a second system using SCSI drives instead of
IDE drives. I have a box (independant from our backups server) here that
is nothing more than a daily 'hot backup' of our main server just in case
I need to do a _fast_ recovery: We store some hundreds of gigabyes of data
on the main server - it would take most of a day to do a more conventional
'restore' from backups. This way I can just install the hot backup drives
and go.
--
Benjamin Franz
"All right, where is the answer? The battle of wits has begun.
It ends when you click and we both serve pages - and find out who is right,
and who is slashdotted." - David Brandt
--
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