Topic: File backup system?

I'm in need of some suggestions. One of the departments where I work deal with large files, some being 600mb or more, and there are lot of them and growing. I didn't realize that they were using this much space and that these files could be this large.

So, I was wondering what are some suggestions for storage and backup.

I would like them to have some grow room. They have almost filled a 250gb drive no problem and have some files stored on their local computers ( Windows and Mac). There's no backup of these files and they had one of the files go missing and then some corrupt. And here is the problem that I've came across.

If I were to do some sort of NAS system with say 1TB of storage, a tape backup that could hold all that only has SCSI connections and can't run software. So...not sure what to do about that. I would like to have a 1TB storage and some sort of tape backup.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

Later,

C:\

We (the company) use an external USB HD for backups. When we aren't backing stuff up, it is stored in a safe to keep locked up and safe from disaster (fire, flooding, unauthorized access, etc.), just in case. Though I don't know how well this method would work with the mass amount of data in your situation.

Where I work we have a need for a large amount of space that's highly reliable. So we do NFS storage, with a hot-standby cluster.

Two servers form the basis of the cluster. They're interlinked. Each has a few large-capacity hard drives. These drives are striped with RAID0 so that they're seen as one big volume (or if you can find good support for ZFS, use that. It's a sweet filesystem). This big volume is then linked to the volume on the other machine using a system called DRBD which mirrors every block of data written on one machine across to the other. Because this kind of setup practically *invites* race-conditions and write-conflicts, DRBD is designed to only have one node writable at any one time.

Now, we use these volumes for the storage of mail from our (admittedly large) mail server cluster, so we require high-availability. For this we use heartbeat, which is a nice system to work with if you like poking yourself in the eye repeatedly with a red-hot fork. It does everything you might want it to, though. You've just got to put up with the fact that version 2 of heartbeat falls in love with the ungodly concept of XML configuration files, and takes it beyond an extreme.

...

*ahem*

Sorry, back to the topic at hand.

Heartbeat takes care of all the cluster resources for us, including monitoring them and taking them up or down as needed. It starts up DRBD, puts one machine in the Primary state, mounts the DRBD filesystem, puts an IP alias in place for the NFS server to use, then starts NFS. Should any resource fail for any reason it will try to bring it back up and, failing that, will shut down all resources and transfer them to the other server. This is the hot-failover portion of it.

Now, I don't know what might be going on with the department there, so the solution we use might be a bit on the extreme side. Then again, it might not. I can point you to everything you need to know in order to set it up, though.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

quote:

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Skaarjj said:

I can point you to everything you need to know in order to set it up, though.

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That would be fantastic. It does seem a bit over the top, but considering that the files that were lost the other day has cause one guy to almost loose his job, put production on long shifts to re-create the files, and piss the customer off...it might be worth it.

I have to admit that I didn't know that the department (pre-press) were generating these kind of files and storing them on their local machines and eventually (when they got around to it) burning DVD's. They are some what separate from my department but I help out when I can. One of the guys asked me one day if I had a place that they could store some files...well, 250gb later, I have no fileserver left LOL.

Thanks for the long reply Skaarjj. Send me some info and I'll write up a proposal for them and see what happens.

Later,

C:\

well, I'm back on this and have a question.

I have a computer that is pretty good, (1gb ram, 4gb cpu) that I use to store some stuff and it doesn't do much more than that.
I was thinking of simply hooking up something like the Drobo and share it to the users. However, it's USB only. Is there an easy way to just share something like this to a couple of users?

Later,

C:\

CPrompt, you can share the external drive and have other users connect using CIFS/SMB.

yeah, I think that we are going to go with getting a Drobo. For around $850 and the backup ability of the Drobo with 2TB of storage...I think that is the best bet for us. We don't really need something as elaborate as what Skaarjj is using.

Later,

C:\