3 ms·

Misses IBM Tivoli TSM and Legato Networker, backup systems that work in practise and don't fail on you. Other than that my vote is on ZFS snapshots reliable.

by acd 12y ago

drKarl 12y ago
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm more inclined to use Open Source solutions, though, which Tivoli and Legato are not. I agree with ZFS but I think it shines as a last resort backup (like rsync.net offers) and not as a main backup system since it doesn't do incremental and deduplication and so on...
- BozeWolf 12y ago
  Snapshots can be incremental, right? Just don't 'chain' too many snapshots of snapshots.
- rsync 12y ago
  I am not sure I understand your comment, but just to be clear: we (rsync.net) have ZFS snapshots enabled in your account, by default. You can request any schedule of days/weeks/months you want, and their (very small) space usage counts against your paid quota. The first 7 dailies are always free (don't count). What this means is you can just do a dumb rsync to us. No incrementals, no expiring datasets, no logic at all - just rsync to us every night and our snapshot rotation schedule does the rest for you. Just browse right in (using the SSH/SFTP based tool of your choice[1]) and grab a file from 6 days ago. Email us and ask about the HN readers discount for new customers. [1] Like filezilla, or SSHFS, or our windows drive mapper
- acd 12y ago
  ZFS is a also a good way to get consistent fast backups of databases by snapshotting. By ZFS copy-on-write its incremental by nature as it you only have to send over deltas incremental streams. Thus for site-to-site backups its usually very fast! Another advantage compared to rsync is that you do not need to directory traverse the whole file system in order to find the differences, I believe its similar to BTRFS in that aspect. Then there is the feature that ZFS has checksums, so that when you write to disk you know what you get otherwise you can get corruption. RAID5-60 for me is a gamble that you can get hidden write disk errors unless there is checksums in software on a higher layer. Always scrub your ZFS source and backup pool.
dagw 12y ago
It's admittedly been 8-10 years since I was responsible for any serious backups so my experience is quite out of date, but Legato Networker is at the end of the day the best backup solution I've ever used. Yes it costs quite a bit of money and it's not trivial to set up, but once you've got it working it works so much better and easier than anything else I've ever used.
CrLf 12y ago
I have a few years experience with TSM and always found it to be pretty fast and very reliable. Like most IBM software, it looks overly complicated and obtuse at first glance, but once you overcome a few "standard" obstacles(1), you realize there's some pretty serious engineering under there and it's actually quite likable. It's not cheap though... (1) IBM software seems so be designed by smart people for really hard scenarios, but it all gets buried under tons of enterprisey crap and UIs designed by monkeys... 1. Drop the excruciatingly slow and clunky web console and learn to use the CLI (really, it's horrible); 2. Resist the urge to throw your arms up in disgust because the syntax and concepts seem foreign (it probably won't look so foreign to mainframe people, and it isn't actually bad, just different); 3. ?? 4. Realize the CLI and storage concepts are actually very powerful.

Misses IBM Tivoli TSM and Legato Networker, backup systems that work in practise and don't fail on you. Other than that my vote is on ZFS snapshots reliable.

by acd 12y ago

Misses IBM Tivoli TSM and Legato Networker, backup systems that work in practise and don't fail on you. Other than that my vote is on ZFS snapshots reliable.

drKarl 12y ago

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm more inclined to use Open Source solutions, though, which Tivoli and Legato are not. I agree with ZFS but I think it shines as a last resort backup (like rsync.net offers) and not as a main backup system since it doesn't do incremental and deduplication and so on...

BozeWolf 12y ago
Snapshots can be incremental, right? Just don't 'chain' too many snapshots of snapshots.
rsync 12y ago
I am not sure I understand your comment, but just to be clear: we (rsync.net) have ZFS snapshots enabled in your account, by default. You can request any schedule of days/weeks/months you want, and their (very small) space usage counts against your paid quota. The first 7 dailies are always free (don't count). What this means is you can just do a dumb rsync to us. No incrementals, no expiring datasets, no logic at all - just rsync to us every night and our snapshot rotation schedule does the rest for you. Just browse right in (using the SSH/SFTP based tool of your choice[1]) and grab a file from 6 days ago. Email us and ask about the HN readers discount for new customers. [1] Like filezilla, or SSHFS, or our windows drive mapper
acd 12y ago
ZFS is a also a good way to get consistent fast backups of databases by snapshotting. By ZFS copy-on-write its incremental by nature as it you only have to send over deltas incremental streams. Thus for site-to-site backups its usually very fast! Another advantage compared to rsync is that you do not need to directory traverse the whole file system in order to find the differences, I believe its similar to BTRFS in that aspect. Then there is the feature that ZFS has checksums, so that when you write to disk you know what you get otherwise you can get corruption. RAID5-60 for me is a gamble that you can get hidden write disk errors unless there is checksums in software on a higher layer. Always scrub your ZFS source and backup pool.

dagw 12y ago

It's admittedly been 8-10 years since I was responsible for any serious backups so my experience is quite out of date, but Legato Networker is at the end of the day the best backup solution I've ever used. Yes it costs quite a bit of money and it's not trivial to set up, but once you've got it working it works so much better and easier than anything else I've ever used.

CrLf 12y ago

I have a few years experience with TSM and always found it to be pretty fast and very reliable. Like most IBM software, it looks overly complicated and obtuse at first glance, but once you overcome a few "standard" obstacles(1), you realize there's some pretty serious engineering under there and it's actually quite likable. It's not cheap though... (1) IBM software seems so be designed by smart people for really hard scenarios, but it all gets buried under tons of enterprisey crap and UIs designed by monkeys... 1. Drop the excruciatingly slow and clunky web console and learn to use the CLI (really, it's horrible); 2. Resist the urge to throw your arms up in disgust because the syntax and concepts seem foreign (it probably won't look so foreign to mainframe people, and it isn't actually bad, just different); 3. ?? 4. Realize the CLI and storage concepts are actually very powerful.