Backup Server to xServe RAID

[krajcd5]

Everyone,

 

I am looking to use my xServe RAID as a backup destination but I have few questions before I do it. Here is what I would like to do. Set up Retrospect for Mac as a backup server with my clients set to backup once per 24 hours. Have that backup script write the backup down to my xServe RAID. Then have a backup script that backs up the RAID to tape for offsite/long term storage. Here are my questions. Can I set up the backup server to execute the "Copy" type of script so my end users documents are stored on the RAID in native format for really easy recovery? If not, no big deal. How would I go about getting the backup from the RAID to the tape? If I needed to recover from the tape would it be a recover of the backup file and then another recovery from the backup file to the actually file?

 

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Let me know if you have any questions.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Sincerely,

Daneil Krajc

[SimonHobson]

Unfortunatly, IIRC you cannot use a Duplicate operation as a backup server task, only on a scheduled basis - one of those features where I believe the Windoze version is ahead. I've done it this way (once) and it's a pain :-(

 

I would not try doing any other type of backup and then copying the resultant huge file to tape. It would mean having to restore the entire archive from tape before you could do anything at all with it, and if there is so much as one error on any tape in the set then the whole archive is lost.

 

If you decide to use scheduled Duplicate operations, then set up a subvolume for each client. You then need to create a script to copy a client to it's partner subvolume on the raid array, and schedule the script to run. You can schedule a pile of scripts for the same time and they will run sequentially. Once you have a copy of the clients, you can back it off to tape with normal operations. Be aware that if you are used to the reduction from Retrospect only making one copy of files that are common across clients, then this does not work within a session - so when backing up your backup, all the system files etc will get copied once per client.

 

However ...

 

I would suggest that until Dantz extract a digit and catch up with their competition you avoid trying to do this. At my last job I ditched tape and went for removable firewire disks, and have recently adviced a client to use disks from scratch. In use, you simply use the removable disks as you would tapes (select removable disk instead of tape when creating backup sets) and it works fine. Because disks have almost instant seek, restoring is a pleasure - especially if you have all the disks in a backup set connected at once.