Hello friends,

I am looking for your advice with regards to back up in a Linux server.

Is tape drive still the option for backing up high volume of data? If so how is this handled in Linux?

How about blu-ray discs? Do blu-ray discs need special drives to write? Does linux's growisofs work for blu-ray as well?

My server is CentOS 5.5. The typical daily backup size ranges between 20 - 80G.

Please throw in your questions, if I have missed anything in this regard.

Thanks

The trend now is disk-to-disk-to-tape. In other words, backup to disk for short term (3 months or less); then backup to tape for long term (3 months to 5 years or longer).

I do some disk to disk (with TAR) and then remote FTP to another location (like my simple data backup here)

Is anybody using blu-ray? I am planning to use blu-ray solution. But could not see much online on the usage of blu-ray in Linux. My idea is to use a blu-ray writer and double layer (50G) rewritable dics for my backups. Any advice?

Thanks

I haven't done much checking recently but about a year or so ago when I was looking into options I found that BluRay wasn't the best supported in Linux, and getting it to write reliably was sort of hit and miss. The other problem (with optical media in general) is long term storage, as most of the typical optical media will degrade rather quickly after being written.

How long do you want to keep a backup available for? Do you want/need an offsite copy of your data? As was already mentioned the current trend is toward disk to disk backups. Of course depending on your need this may or may not be a viable solution. So in the business world the general trend has been disk to disk to tape. This combination will generally mix a recent copy locally on disk for easy and fast restore, plus moving those backups offsite on tape for long term retention.

Thanks guys. The pattern is as follows:

Take daily backups
The daily backups get overwritten the following week (ie use the same (rw)disk every Monday and so on)
Keep the Thursday's disk to preserve weekly backup(ie use 3/4 different disks on Thursdays of a month to be used every Thursday)
Use a Monthly disk every last Thursday of a month and this will be kept for a year (which then will be overwritten).

If the above is not clear, please let me know.

Thanks

Guys,

I started using single layer blu-ray back up system.

Got the Blu-ray drive LiteON iHBS212, a single layer disc (25G) and a dual layer disc (50G), both BD-RE (not tried BD-R). Following are the set of commands I tried to burn the discs:

dvd+rw-format -f /dev/dvd
growisofs -Z /dev/dvd=/tmp/myiso.iso

On both blu-ray discs (single and dual layers), it worked straight away whether the image is in ISO or UDF format.

However, if the image is in UDF format, the drive writes to the dvd successfully; but after the successful write, the disc could not be read on any blu-ray or dvd drives (probably need to play with write speed).

I tried different combinations of the the following set of commands:

dvd+rw-format -b /dev/dvd
dvd+rw-format -b=full /dev/dvd (this is a pain - takes ages)

growisofs -Z /dev/dvd=/tmp/myiso.iso
growisofs -dvd-compat /dev/dvd=/tmp/myiso.iso
growisofs --use-the-force-luke=dao /dev/dvd=/tmp/myiso.iso

But in all the cases, if the image format is ISO, it works both on blu-ray and dvd seamlesly. But if the image format is UDF, dvd gets written but becomes unreadable.

My OS configuration :

Centos 5.5 (64 bits) - Kernel 2.6.18-238.12.1.el5.

Please let me know if you need anymore information in this regard.

Cheers