Backup / APS Solution

Question

Good afternoon. I have been reading the archives, and there are numerous questions about backup, but nearly every one lacks enough information for the question to get answered, so I am going to try again.
I have an X-serve with one 80GB drive. We use this server primarily as a web/mysql server. I use built-in apache and mysql along with Omnipilot Lasso to serve our webpages.
Up to now, I have been using this as a test server only, but plan to make it our primary web server sometime in the next few weeks. My questions:
*What is the best software/program to use for a backup?
*How tough is it to add another 80gb drive and stripe it for raid so I have redundancy?
*In a perfect world, I would like to have the following configuration:
Drive 1: 80GB -> Primary Drive
Drive 2: 80GB -> Second Primary Raid with #1
Drive 3: 80GB -> Backup Drive
Then, I would want to back up quickly to the third drive.
Finally, I want to backup to tape so I can have a daily copy on tape and a fire backup off site. What hardware would you suggest? Although I don't have tons of data now, we could end up with 40-50gb of photos, drawings, etc.
Finally...what is the best APC hardware/software for xserve?
Thanks!

Answer 1

*What is the best software/program to use for a backup?
There is no one single answer to this question.
There are many products that aim at different segments of the market, offer different performance levels and cost different amounts of money (from $0 to thousands)
If all you want is a copy of the entire drive then the bundled tools such as asr, rsync and even cp with a little creating shell scripting might be sufficient.
If you want automated, point-in-time replicas so that you can restore the system to its condition on a specific date then you'll probably benefit from one of the commercial applications such as Retrospect, NetVault, or Time Navigator (amongst others).
You might also want a backup solution that can handle backup to tape for secure, off-site backups. Or maybe you want a disk-to-disk-to-tape solution for speed. Or maybe you want a network-based solution that can backup your network clients, too.
You see what I mean about there not being a single answer to that question, at least not without first answering the other questions that go along with it.
*How tough is it to add another 80gb drive and stripe it for raid so I have redundancy?
Striping adds nothing to redundancy. In fact, it's worse than a single drive.
When striped across two disks, you have twice as many points of failure that will result in the loss of data (either drive could fail and you're out of luck).
Maybe what you mean is mirroring, where the data is written to two drives at the same time. This offers redundancy against a single-disk failure and can be done without reformatting the volume, although it's easier to do if you can reformat.
*In a perfect world, I would like to have the following configuration:
Drive 1: 80GB -> Primary Drive
Drive 2: 80GB -> Second Primary Raid with #1
Drive 3: 80GB -> Backup Drive
You could have a RAID 1 mirror on disks 1 and 2, using asr> to replicate the entire volume to disk 3 on a periodic basis. Current cost $0.
Finally, I want to backup to tape so I can have a daily copy on tape and a fire backup off site. What hardware would you suggest? Although I don't have tons of data now, we could end up with 40-50gb of photos, drawings, etc.
There are numerous tape options available. You need to consider not just the current amount of data, but plan for growth, and also for full vs. incremental backups - even if there's 60GB of data on the drive, you might only need to backup 1 or 2GB per day.
Then you might want a single -tape drive that you have to load with tapes, or you could use an autoloader which can automatically load a spare tape for unattended backups.
Finally, budget is often the largest factor when considering tape backup. There is a direct relationship between speed, capacity and price. You can spend as little as a few hundred dollars if you don't mind backing up to 10 tapes, and taking 8 hours to do it, or you could spend thousands and have it done automatically in a few minutes. Set your budget then find a system that fits.
Note that if you do go to tape you will need some third party software since the Mac OS doesn't come with anything capable of talking to a tape drive directly. You should factor this into your budget, and make sure that whatever tape system you buy is compatible with whatever software solution you use.
Finally...what is the best APC hardware/software for xserve?
How long do you want the system to run on battery power before powering down?
Do you want just the server to run on battery power? What about the switch, router, and other infrastructure so that your web site stays up and accessible to the outside world?
APC units serve two purposes - first is power smoothing to reduce/eliminate spikes and drops in the power supply and second to provide a power source in the case of a power loss.
You'd need to look at your current power situation to decide what's important to you. If you're in an area with flaky power supply and frequent brownouts and blackouts you'll want a higher-rated supply that can keep you ticking for an extended period. If your power supply is generally good and reliable then a smaller unit might suffice given that it's not going to be the sole power supply frequently, and even when it is it's likely to be for a short period of time before utility power is restored.