Re: backups on big, busy, networked drive

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
> My work colleague has the task of backing up a disk drive that 1) is very
> large, 2) is fairly full, 3) is never idle, or even close, 4) tries to
> take more than 24 hours to do a daily backup over a network, 5) involves
> one directory that consumes 70% of the disk capacity.
>
> The network available bandwidth drops to 0.1% of normal when he kicks off
> a backup, which means he has to cancel it to keep the 24x7 users happy.
>
> He's "quaking in his boots" about what happens if a drive failure occurs.
>
>
> Any pointers to technology/methods that are used to do regular Linux
> backups without taking the system offline and despite the above
> circumstances, would be appreciated.
>
I am not sure if this would help or not.

What I would do, based on a lighter load, is not backup over a network, but
backup to as fast a tape drive as I could find on the machine where that
disk drive actually is.

I use Exabyte VXA-2 hard drive on my main machine (6 hard drives), and a
VXA-1 on my old machine (3 hard drives).

A VXA-320 hard drive (faster and greater capacity than mine) will do 320
GBytes (compressed 2:1 in hardware) at a speed of 86GBytes/hour. These cost
about $1500 for an internal drive.

http://www.exabyte.com/products/products/get_products.cfm?prod_id=641&product=VXA%2D320%20Packet%20Tape%20Drive

You can get a 10 cartridge loader for these, too, if you need more capacity.

http://www.exabyte.com/products/products/get_products.cfm?prod_id=621&product=VXA%2D320%20PacketLoader%201x10%201U


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