nixCraft

Hi all
i'm looking for good advice regarding backup plan becuase its first time to me handle large scale database expected to grow up 10000 - 20000 record per year with daily operations on it
I'm working as sysAdmin in educational organization ( junior level ) with mixed OSes environment including ( win2k3 - win2k8 - Linux -Unix Solaris Sparc & x86_x64 ) mixed RDBMS form different vendors including ( MS SQL Server - MySQL - Oracle ) mixed network infrastructure from different vendors as well as the hardware of servers .
In brief the core layout of my business is as follows:-
1- a dedicated web server serving business logic as webbased interface (only 1) as the clients of it will be few .
2- a dedicated database server serving only at most 2 databases beside system databases ( for now its SQL server 2005 in near future we will migrate to oracle ) and the main database initial size is about 1 GB for now it holds just dummy data for testing purposes .
its expected to grow up 10000 - 20000 record per year as i think all records are just text and numeric fields as i guess there are no BLOBs but i'm not sure .
3- backup devices are as follows entry level DAT drive with max size of 36 GB in native mode and red ray DVD drives .
and there's no budget for now or for the near future to buy new expensive storage .
the operation on data are daily ( 6 days per week 8-10 hours per day it's needn't to be up and online 24/7 for now ( daily data retrieval - daily data modification )
what should i do to put a good backup plan for 3 years from now and forward .
should i employee something like freeNAS or Openfiler or just getting enough with offline backups on tapes only also i want to decrease downtime in case of disasters as the dependency on the database will grow up day after day .
I’m looking for a tip in putting a good backup plan.
sorry for long
thanks for your helpful souls

Do you want exact mirror copies of server hard drive or do you want snapshot based backup?

I suggest keeping tape and adding another disk based server with cross platform support for backing up files and database.

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Vivek Gite
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Thanks for your reply but what do mean by "do you want snapshot based backup?"
more explanation if you please
and thanks again for your quick reply

Snapshots means incremental snapshots of local and remote filesystems for any number of machines in form of daily, weekly, hourly format. This is useful to get backup (restore files) from specific day, hour, week or month.

__________________
Vivek Gite
Linux Evangelist
Be proud RHEL user, and let the world know about your enterprise choices! Join RedHat user group.
Always use CODE tags for posting system output and commands!
Do you run a Linux? Let's face it, you need help

Thanks a million