We have a NAS server at the company I work for that is being used for storing photography sessions. Each session is approximately 100gb. Over the last couple of years this server has accumulated 10+ TB of data, and we are increasing the amount of photoshoots exponentially. I estimate that by the end of next year we will have 20+ TB stored on this NAS. We are currently backing this server up to tape using LTO-5 tapes with Symantec BackupExec. Since the size of this server has grown, full backups of this server are not completing overnight. Does anyone have any suggestion on how to backup this amount of data? Should we be backing it up to tape? Are there any other options which may be better?
On a server, install git
cd /
git init
git add .
git commit -a -m "Yes, this is server"
Then get /.git/ to point to a network drive (SAN, NFS, Samba whatever) or different disk. Use a cron job every hour/day etc. to update the changes. The .git directory would contain a versioned copy of all the server files (excluding the useless/complicated ones like /proc, /dev etc.)
For a non-important development server where I don't want the hassle/cost of setting it up on a proper backup system, and where backups would only be for convenience (I.E. we don't need to backup this server but it would save some time if things went wrong), could this be a valid backup solution or will it just fall over in a big pile of poop?
When following the instructions to do rsync backups given here: http://troy.jdmz.net/rsync/index.html
I get the error "protocol version mismatch -- is your shell clean?"
I read somewhere that I needed to silence the prompt (PS1="") and motd (.hushlogin) displays to deal with this. I have done this, the prompt and login banner (MOTD) not longer appear, but the error still appears when I run:
rsync -avvvz -e "ssh -i /home/thisuser/cron/thishost-rsync-key" remoteuser@remotehost:/remote/dir /this/dir/
Both ssh client and sshd server are using version 2 of the protocol.
What could be the problem?
[EDIT] I have found http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/jpmg/ssh/authorized_keys_howto.html which directs that it is sometimes necessary to "Force v2 by using the -2 flag to ssh or slogin
ssh -2 -i ~/.ssh/my_private_key remotemachine"
It is not clear this solved the problem as I think I put this change in AFTER the error changed but the fact is the error has evolved to something else. I'll update this when I learn more. And I will certainly try the suggestion to run this in an emacs shell -
When backing up with rsync, How do I keep the full directory structure?
For example, the remote server is saturn, and I want to backup saturn's /home/udi/files/pictures to a local directory named backup.
I want to have (locally) backup/home/udi/files/pictures rather than backup/pictures.
When someone mentions RAID in a conversation about backups, invariably someone declares that "RAID is not a backup."
Sure, for striping, that's true. But what's the difference between redundancy and a backup?