RE: bkbits.net is down

This is why all my clients get HP 7504a tape drives in their tape servers.
40/80GB tape that can do disaster recovery is a GOOD thing!  :-)

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-----Original Message-----
From: [e-mail]
[mailto:[e-mail]]On Behalf Of Joshua Penix
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 11:08 PM
To: Linux Kernel Mailing List
Subject: Re: bkbits.net is down

On Fri, 2003-06-27 at 20:19, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2003 at 08:51:40PM -0400, Scott McDermott wrote:
> > Larry McVoy on Fri 27/06 17:16 -0700:
> > > I don't know if you all realize this but at one point we
> > > had corrupted data in several repositories and the backups
> > > were also shot.
> >
> > ever hear of tapes?
>
> bkbits is 45GB of data and growing.  Tapes are completely impractical,
> that's why we have hot spares.

Boy you do need a good admin :)  Done correctly, tapes are quite
practical for that amount of data.  A LTO or SDLT drive would back the
entire 45GB thing up on a single tape, with room for at least one to two
more full backups.  Granted, you're not going to have tape act as your
hot backup, but it is a good third line of defense.  Plus data backed up
to tape is immune from human or software error that may otherwise affect
the hard-drive based data.

45GB of code is very compressible and I'm sure good chunks of that don't
change on a weekly basis.  I'd imagine you could get a weekly or
bi-weekly full backup to tape in the span of about two hours, and then
do nightly differentials which would probably be only 15 minutes in
length.  A filesystem capable of doing snapshots would ensure
consistency of the repositories on tape and would prevent you from
having to shutdown bkbits while backing up.

--Josh