[OpenIndiana-discuss] Backups and snapshots

[Jonathan Adams]

We've given up on tapes in house, they are far to costly per Gb, and
we were spending all day backing up to them.

We have gone over to a fully ZFS system ... replicated at 3 sites per
active machine.

data is generated (by users) at site 1 (on ZFS raid ... generally 2
disks), this is then snapshot'd and sent to remote computers at other
sites, which is restored onto external 3 way ZFS RAID (usb) ... after
1 year these disks are taken offline and stored in fireproof safes,
leaving the latest snapshot on a new set of drives and purging all
previous snapshots. (we also replicate to another machine at the same
site as the original to guard for hardware failure, but that is kept
as a convenience only)

It's not perfect, but since the machines are physically distinct we
have data integrity (unlikely to lose all 3 machines at once, or all
drives) ...

we have to keep all our data for, currently, 7 years ...  we keep it
longer on tape, but that isn't too bad a price.

we have currently 4 sets of disks, so that's 12 disks a year per site,
for 7 years ... we just had to make sure we got reasonable fireproof
safes.

The upside to this is that it now so much easier to get back any files
that one of our users "accidentally" deletes, or overwrites ...

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Da: Gary Driggs
> A: Discussion list for OpenIndiana
> Data: 11 giugno 2011 22.56.39 CEST
> Oggetto: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Backups and snapshots
> On Jun 11, 2011, at 1:40 PM, Gabriele Bulfon
> wrote:
> BTW, discussion forked into NFS vs iScsi.
> What is your backup strategies on tapes?
> That will vary considerably depending on the size of your org, its budget, and the amount of data it amasses &must archive for business needs and/or compliance reasons.
>