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August 25th, 2005 12:00
Disk backup and recovery for PowerEdge Servers
I would like to be able to backup and recover data for PowerEdge servers. Will servers work with USB external disk drives? I am looking for an alternative to tape for backup and recovery for Dell PowerEdge servers. Do you have any suggestions?
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pcmeiners
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August 25th, 2005 12:00
mcolman
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August 26th, 2005 21:00
Let me tell you what I have done:
I have taken a P2500 that has a RAID cage (2 OS disks mirrored RAID1) and slapped 6x73GB drives into the other 6 slots. 5X75gb are set up as RAID 5 and the 6th one is a hot swap.
I installed 1 GBit Network card in the 2500, and I have 1 Gbit switches on the LAN, so everything is transfering at the max rate (backups can take a while depending on how much you have and how you have set up the backup). Every weekend I make a full backup of my servers (I have 6), and daily during the week I do incrementals 1.5 hours apart.
The advantages to online backups are:
1. Recovery is lightspeed compared to tape if you need to recover a down server .
2. Disks last a lot longer than tapes.(usualy around 7-9 years for disks vs. 2 years for tapes)
3. Tapes don't stretch and break
4. Disks don't get lost (at least most of the time :)
For disaster recovery, you could do one of the following:
1. Burn a backup every month onto DVDs and take them offsite (home?)
2. Have two sets of the disks (the 6X73gb), and rotate them in/out every month/2 weeks/week depending on how comfortable you feel.
2. Have an old server offsite (home), and backup to it periodically . This assumes you have broadband at home :)
Message Edited by mcolman on 08-26-2005 05:28 PM