Hello,

I am a new System Admin with almost no LINUX admin experience....yes it's been a wild ride so far.

Our company is small (5-6 servers, 7 users). The servers are all LINUX bases distros and the desktops are mostly LINUX based except for two Macs and one Windows Vista box.

I need to come up with a backup stategy for us. This is the hardware I have for that:

1. Dedicated server with plenty of diskspace (= as much as I will need)
2. HP Ultrium 232
3. Gigabit network card
5. Clients also using gigabit ethernet

And I want to use bacula to backup everything.

Right now there are 7 of us but the company has the potencial to grow very quickly to about 20. The new users will all be on LINUX distros. We will not be backing up entire file systems, just critical files. Our backup strategy is not for system recovery.

I have two ideas so far:

1. Put the bacula client on every box and shedule it.
2. Rsync every box back to the dedicated server and then backup the dedicated server.

Please give me your opinions or ideas. I am a former Windows Admin and we never had to back up desktop machines (everything was on the file server or in a database), but this is the way the Senior Sys Admin wants the topolgy to be.

Thanks for any help or advice,

P.

I'd say start off keeping all critical stuff on a separate partitions.


(got any jobs?)

Billy,

Thank you for the advice. The data we will be backing up on the client desktop machines is located in /home.

Each server is a different story.

We have no jobs set up right now because I have not decided on how I want to do this.

Thanks again,

Pedro

The industry standard for backups is to perform a full backup once a week and to perform incremental backups the other six days of the week. Even if you don't want to perform a full system backup you can still perform a full backup of the /home directory tree. I don't understand why you don't want to perform a full system backup. Restoring from backups is a lot easier and faster than installing the operating system and applications from software kits. The first thing that I do with new clients is to get them to start performing backups. That has already helped me when clients' hard disks go bad.

Other important factors include encrypting your backups and keeping a copy of your backups off site.

Hey thanks for answering. I assume you are talking about full system backups of the servers only

The reason the senior admin does not want to do full system backups of the servers is he says it is faster just to reinstall the OS. I could definately argue with that point especially after looking over the documentation of a TYPO3 CRM solution. I agree with you that at least some critical servers need a full system backup but due to a lack of experience and knowledge we are going this route.

Thanks again,

Pedro

As mentioned, backup clients (& other servers) to designated backup server.
Then backup the 'backup server' to external media tape/cd/dvd.
Remove media from building.
At least 1 full backup per week, otherwise use incremental and keep track.
Ideally 2 copies in case 1 goes bad.
Also, you must do test restores regularly, otherwise all you've got is a maybe!

Hey Chris,

Thanks for the advice. I think of my two options:

1. Put the bacula client on every box and shedule backups of each box.
OR
2. Rsync every box back to the dedicated server and then backup the dedicated server.

Number two has its advantages mainly due to its simplicity and ability to scale pretty well. So unless someone sees a gotcha with this method, I am going to run with it.

Thanks to everyone for their ideas,

Pedro
Granada Spain

I'd go with option 2 and cron it.
You need to ensure that all clients leave their systems on at night for backup.
Make sure you check for this programatically and send yourself an email (and them!) if they don't.

OK Chris,

Good call on the email. Iĺl bet the hardest part of this will be getting the developers to leave thier machines on at night but that can be drilled into thier heads for sure.

Thanks again,

P.

It's easy if you can get the boss to issue a memo backing you up (no pun intended).
BTW, they should shutdown/logout of all software (inc actual logout), otherwise the backup may have issues with open files etc.