Subj : To RAID or not to RAID?
To   : Evan Elias
From : Angus Mcleod
Date : Fri Aug 20 2004 01:06 pm

  Re: To RAID or not to RAID?
  By: Evan Elias to Angus Mcleod on Thu Aug 19 2004 22:15:00

 >  > of the tapedrive a waste of money.  You'd be better off building a separa
 >  > machine to copy your data to.  (We actually did this in the office.)
 > 
 > Actually, that's what we do at work too... put an otherwise
 > too-old-for-general-use desktop back into a useful state by making it our
 > backup system, dumping a bunch of tgz's there nightly and having a cron job
 > kill the backups over 5 days old.  Works well, have done recoveries from it
 > flawlessly, and it's essentially free (yay old hardware, aside from the newe
 > HD's) and took little time to set up.

We built a machine with RAID-1 storage, extra disk cooling, and self-monitoring
to it would send me a page (later a text message) if anything went out of spec.
Like a fan slowing, the system temperature evelating, or a disk starting to
generate errors.

We used it mainly for ORACLE cold backups.  We mounted a slice of the backup
machine on the database server via NFS.  Then the database machine shut down
the database, did a cold backup (simple copy of all database files) to the NFS-
mounted slice, and brought the database back up again, while the NFS share was
unmounted.

The backup machine then tarred and gzipped the cold backup into a file whose
name consisted of the database SID and the date/time of the backup.  This was
stuck in a directory called /backups/weekly on which we ran a daily cron job
using find with -daystart and -ctime and -exec rm \{\} \; to expunge the older
files.  We actually kept about 12 days worth of backups, although The Boss was
told we only kept a weeks worth.  Oh, and we also had a /backups/monthly in
which the first backup of the month was copied, and kept for a year.

We did this for six separate database instances every night.

I tried to get The Boss to spring for a DVD burner for the machine so we could
do a periodic (if not daily) removable backup of the .tgz files as well, but he
kept moaning about how expen$ive the drive was.....

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