Our Back Up Strategies
This is my first ezine article, and I would like to share with you how we backup both Windows and Linux machines.
Backing up is very important and, now-a-days, very cheap and easy.
I won't bore you with tales from the 'Good Old Days' but I will say that I am very glad to be away from tape drives.
First I will explain how we backup our Windows server.
We use Western Digital MyBooks and Cobian Backup.
We've been using this setup for years.
The external hard-drives sell at Tiger Direct for $100 for a teraByte drive and Cobian is free.
We have two of these in use and I will explain why: 1.
Monthly offsite; in case the shop gets hit by a meteoroid or something (the chances are very slim, but stuff happens).
We do a complete backup of the Windows server and remove the external drive from the shop when it is done.
2.
Monthly and daily changes.
Once a month, we do a complete back-up of the server.
Every night our days work is saved to the same external hard-drive as well.
This protects against hardware failure and/or malicious code.
Every night the scanner is run, and if no infections are found, that days changes are saved to the external hard-drive.
Now that we have covered the Windows machine, we will move on to the Linux Box.
We have three systems in place for backing up this server: 1.
Weekly offsite.
I purchased a little cube computer and installed the exact same Linux that I setup as our main Linux box.
Once a week we bring it the shop, plug it in and run a shell script that copies all the MySQL data from the main server to the little cube backup.
2.
Weekly zip.
A crond script compresses and copies all of our MySQL onto another Linux server.
This gives us a history in case we ever have to step back; it doesn't take up as much room as daily backups.
3.
Real-time.
Our MySQL server has a master->slave cluster with a in-house Linux server to give us almost real-time backups.
I cannot emphasize the importance of good backups.
I hope that if your not backing up your data, you will soon start, and, if you are already backing up your data, that you found something useful in my first post.
Backing up is very important and, now-a-days, very cheap and easy.
I won't bore you with tales from the 'Good Old Days' but I will say that I am very glad to be away from tape drives.
First I will explain how we backup our Windows server.
We use Western Digital MyBooks and Cobian Backup.
We've been using this setup for years.
The external hard-drives sell at Tiger Direct for $100 for a teraByte drive and Cobian is free.
We have two of these in use and I will explain why: 1.
Monthly offsite; in case the shop gets hit by a meteoroid or something (the chances are very slim, but stuff happens).
We do a complete backup of the Windows server and remove the external drive from the shop when it is done.
2.
Monthly and daily changes.
Once a month, we do a complete back-up of the server.
Every night our days work is saved to the same external hard-drive as well.
This protects against hardware failure and/or malicious code.
Every night the scanner is run, and if no infections are found, that days changes are saved to the external hard-drive.
Now that we have covered the Windows machine, we will move on to the Linux Box.
We have three systems in place for backing up this server: 1.
Weekly offsite.
I purchased a little cube computer and installed the exact same Linux that I setup as our main Linux box.
Once a week we bring it the shop, plug it in and run a shell script that copies all the MySQL data from the main server to the little cube backup.
2.
Weekly zip.
A crond script compresses and copies all of our MySQL onto another Linux server.
This gives us a history in case we ever have to step back; it doesn't take up as much room as daily backups.
3.
Real-time.
Our MySQL server has a master->slave cluster with a in-house Linux server to give us almost real-time backups.
I cannot emphasize the importance of good backups.
I hope that if your not backing up your data, you will soon start, and, if you are already backing up your data, that you found something useful in my first post.
Source...