Backups Hardwares for FreeBSD

[Mario Theodoridis]

On Tuesday 23 October 2007 09:34:24 Paulo Fragoso wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We have a FreeBSD mail server with 1TB RAID 6 using Areca ARC-1220 
> controler, all works fine.
> 
> Today our backups are made on DDS-4 tapes, they are very slow and too 
> small, this is our problem. What is a good (modern) alternative to DDS-4 
> working on FreeBSD?

I'm not an ISP, but i found harddrives to be very effective.
I use bacula to backup various locations.

Once a month i do a full backup which gets copied on a 400G SATA harddrive and taken offsite.
I have 2 of these 400G harddrives. One is always offsite.

Then i have nightly incremental backups which i rsync offsite over the network.
So i effectively have nightly offsite backups.
The full data set used to be around a 150G. It's down to 80G now.

Hot plugging the harddrive:
I found USB2 to be flaky on FreeBSD resulting in either dropping to USB1 or locking up the box.
I currently have an on board SATA controller that shows up as IDE. This allows using atacontrol 
attach/detach and works well. Most higher end disk controllers also facilitate hot plugging.


This should scale well to larger datasets as larger harddrive become available. Harddrives are 
relatively cheap, fast and they're well protected.

The only gotcha you might run into is doing nightly incremental backups over the net if the incremental
datasets get too big. But you'll have that problem regardless of storage medium.

A nightly incremental of my 6-stable server runs around 10-30M. This obviously varies on how much
data changes are on a given box.

mario;>