Backup cartoon #9

Before disposing of useless information please make file copies.

What about NAS Backups?

At one time, I felt that NAS had a rather distinct disadvantage. While it did significantly reduce system administration requirements, it created a challenge in one particular area - backup and recovery. Since more NAS filers usually involve a stripped down (or significantly customized) version of the operating system, normal backup and recovery client software often isn't applicable. With a few exceptions, you can't simply buy client software from your backup vendor for your filer. Although this has gotten better, there was a time when the only way to backup your NAS appliance was to use rdump or to back it up via an NFS mount.

Even the advent of the network data management protocol (NDMP) didn't seem to help things at first. It usually meant locally attaching a tape drive to a filer and backing up that server's data to that tape drive. This often meant a significant reduction in automation. It didn't help that software vendors were slow to support NDMP, because they saw it as competition to their own client software.

However, a lost has changed in recent years. All major backup-software vendors support NDMP, and you can even use SAN technology to share a tape library between your filers and your other backup servers. Even if you're backing up your filers across the network, gigabit NICs that offloaded the TCP/IP processing from the host CPU make data transfer over the network much easier and faster. Jumbo frames also helped some vendors.

Another reason that backup and recovery of filers is now less a problem is that some NAS vendors introduced data-protection options equivalent to (and sometimes easier to use than) the options available on many UNIX or NT systems - including built-in shapshots, mirroring and replication. Therefore, for what it's worth, my respect for NAS has grown significantly in recent years.

Backup cartoon #8

'Oh, the magic carpets are just for backup.'

Preparing for the worst

One of the simplest rules of systems administration is that disks and systems fail. If you haven't already lost a system or at least a disk drive, consider yourself extremely lucky. You also might consider the statistical possibility that your time is coming really soon. Backup & recovery should be part of the disaster recovery plan,

My Dad Was Right

My father used to tell me, "There are two types of motorcycle owners. Those who have fallen, and those who will fall." The same rule applies to system administrators. There are those who have lost a disk drive and those who will lose a disk drive. (I'm sure my dad was just trying to keep me from buying a motorcycle, but the logic still applies. That's not bad for a guy who got his first computer last year, don't you think?)

Whenever I speak about my favorite subject at conferences, I always ask questions like, "Who has ever lost a disk drive?" or "Who has lost an entire system?". When I asked those questions there, someone raised his hand and said, "My computer room just got struck by lightning." That sure made for an interesting discussion! If you haven't lost a system, look around you... one of your friend has.

Speaking of old adages, the one that says "It'll never happen to me" applies here as well. Ask anyone who's been mugged if they thought it would happen to them. Ask anyone who's been in a car accident if they ever thought it would happen to them. Ask the guy whose computer room was struck by lightning if he though it would ever happen to him. The answer is always 'No.'

The whole reason of writing this post is to make you able to recover from some level of disaster. Whether it's a user who has accidently or maliciously damaged something or a tornado that has taken out your entire server room, the only way you are going to recover is by having a good, complete, disaster recovery plan that is based on a solid backup and recovery system.

Neither can exist completely without the other. If you have a great backup system but aren't storing your media off-site, you'll be sorry when that tornado hits. You may have the most well organized, well protected set of backup volumes, but they won't be of any help if your backup and recovery system hasn't properly stored the data on those volumes. Getting good backups may be an early step in your disaster recovery plan, but the rest of that plan - organizing and protecting those backups against a disaster - should follow soon after. Although the task may seem daunting, it's not impossible.

Backup cartoon #6

It's good to know your guardian angel is always there to look out for you and can't be charged as an accomplice.

The One That Got Away: True story of not taking backups

"You mean to tell me that we have absolutely no backups of paris whatsoever?" I will never forget those words. I had been in charge of backups for only two months, and I just knew my career was over. We had moved an Oracle application from one server to another about six weeks earlier, and there was one crucial part of the move that I missed. I knew very little about database backups in those days, and I didn't realize that I needed to shut down an Oracle database before backing it up. This was accomplished on the old server by a cron job that I never knew existed. I discovered all of this after a disk on the new server went south.

"Just give us the last full backup," they said. I started looking through my logs. That's when I started seeing the errors. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just use an older backup." The older logs didn't look any better. Frantic, I looked at log after log until I came to one that looked as if it were OK. It was just over six weeks old. When I went to grab that volume, I realized that we had a six-week rotation cycle, and we had over-written that volume two days before.

That was it! At that moment, I knew that I'd be looking for another job. This was our purchasing database, and this data loss would amount to approximately two months of lost purchase orders for a multibillion-dollar company.

So I told me boss the news. That's when I heard, "You mean to tell me that we have absolutely no backups of paris whatsoever?" Isn't it amazing that I haven't forgotten its name? I don't remember any other system names from that place, but I remember this one. I felt so small that I could have fit inside a 4mm tape box. Fortunately, a system administrator worked what, at the time, I could only describe as magic. The dead disk was resurrected, and the data was recovered straight from the disk itself. We lost only a few days' worth of data. Our department had to send a memo to the entire company saying that any purchase order entered in the last two days had to be reentered. I should have framed a copy of that memo to remind me what can happen if you don't take this job seriously enough. I didn't need to though; its image is permanently etched in my brain.

Backup cartoon #5

"As a deterrent, we're finding 'not by the hair on my chinny chin chin' needs backup."

Hard Disks - cheap way to store backups

Disks have become a very attractive backup target these days. Here is a quick summary of some of the reasons why is it so:

• Cost: The biggest reason that disk has become such an attractive backup target is that the cost of disk has been dramatically reduced in the last few years. The cost of a reasonably priced disk array is now approximately the same price as a similarly sized tape library filled with media. When you consider some of the things you can do with disk, such as eliminating full backups and redundant files, disk becomes even less expensive.
• Reliability: Unlike tapes, disks are closed systems that aren't susceptible to outside contaminants. In addition, the actual media of a hard drive is, well, hard when compared to a piece of tape media. The result is that an individual disk drive is inherently more reliable than a tape drive. Disk drives become even more reliable when you put them in a RAID array.
• Flexibility: Generally speaking, tape drives can only go two speeds: stop & very fast. Yes, some tape drives support variable speeds. However, they can usually only slow down to about 40% of the rated speed of the drive. Disk drives, on the other hand, work at whatever speed you need them to go. If you need to go a few hundred megabytes per second, put a few drives in a RAID group, and blast away. Then if you need that some RAID group to write at 10KB/s, go ahead. Unlike tape drives, disk drives have no problem writing slowly, then quickly, then slowly, then.... You get the picture. This makes disk a perfect match for unpredictable backup streams. Once all that random data has been written in a serial fashion on your disk device, the disks can easily stream backup data to tape - if that's what you want to do. Some people are foregoing that step altogether and replacing it with replication. Try doing that with a tape drive.
  

Disk based backups are also an extremely economical way to bring completely automated backups to small & medium businesses (SMBs). While a large tape library can be very inexpensive (on a dollars-per-GB basis) and very expandable, the same is not always true of smaller libraries aimed at the SMB market. The big challenge is expandability. The less expensive a tape library is, the less expandable it usually is.

Backup cartoon #4

'With McBride here as our fall-back, all our systems are virtually foolproof.'

cpio archive for UNIX

cpio is a binary file archiver & a file format basically for the UNIX based systems that ends with .cpio file extensions. Available under the GNU license, cpio software utility was meant to be a tape archiver that was originally part of PWB/UNIX and that was also part of UNIX System III & UNIX System V and is a stream of files & directories in a single archive. Though its later versions, such as tar, are more popular & considered to be a better solutions that cpio itself but it's usage in the RPM Package Manager, the Linux Kernel 2.6 series' initramfs, Oracle's distribution of its software in the cpio format and Apple's 'pax' installer archive continues to make cpio an important archive format.

The header of a cpio archive contains information such as the file names, time stamp, owners & permissions and was designed to store backups onto a tape device in a contiguous manner. Like the Tar format, CPIO archives are often compressed using Gzip and distributed as .cpgz or .cpio.gz files and supports the binary, old & new ASCII, crc, HPUX binary, HPUX old ASCII, old tar & POSIX.1 tar archive formats.

The cpio utility was standardized in POSIX.1-1988 & was dropped from later revisions, starting with POSIX.1-2001 due to its 8 GB filesize limit. The POSIX standardized pax utility can be used to read and write cpio archives instead. The latest release of cpio is version 2.10 that was released on 20-June-2009 after minor bugfixes.

Backup cartoon #3

Ritz Cafe - Sorry, closed. Our regular, backup and emergency can openers are down.

Implementing Backup and Recovery by David B Little & David A. Chapa

Implementing Backup and Recovery: The Readiness Guide for the Enterprise is a book by David B Little & David A. Chapa that arms you with all the information you need to architect a backup and recovery system. System backup is essential in any enterprise - protecting data is equivalent to protecting the company or agency. Whether you have the task of putting together a backup and recovery system for your organization or you are thinking about how backup & recovery rits within the scope of total data availability, this book is an invaluable resource.

Implementing Backup and Recovery takes you through the necessary steps of deploying services by showing you how to address the architecture, limitations and capabilities of the existing network infrastructure. After an introduction to backup and recovery in the enterprise, Little and Chapa give a tutorial on the components of backup. Then, using VERITAS NetBackup as an example, they show you how to install and configure a backup application and how to customize services to meet customer needs. Throughout the book, the authors use real-life client situations to explain specific concepts. In addition, you'll also learn:

• The business & legal requirements of backup systems
• VERITAS NetBackup's tiered architecture and configuration elements
• How to determine your need for additional backup services
• What the future holds for backup and recovery
  

Discus backup

See the cartoon above wherein the discus threw by an athlete crashes on the head of a person and he says, "Oops, it crashed. Luckily, I made a backup discus."

Cobian Backup 8 backup software for Windows

Cobian Backup 8 (Blackmoon) is the only open source backup software for Windows which comes with GUI. Written in Delphi by Luis Cobian of the Umea University, Cobian Backup 8 is 100% free & donation-supported backup software for Microsoft Windows platform.

The latest version of Cobian Backup is 9.5.1.212 which supports Unicode, FTP, compression (Zip, SQX, 7z), encryption (including Blowfish, Rijndael, DES, RSA-Rijndael, incremental and differential backup. It also supports long file names (upto 32,000 characters) for all backup types except ZIP (which supports only 256 characters). The software may be installed as an application or as a service running in the background. Multilingual support is implemented via user-submitted language files.

Blackmoon is a multi-threaded program that can be used to schedule & backup your files and directories from their original location to other directories/drives in the same computer or any other computer on the network. FTP backup is also supported in both directions (download and upload). Blackmoon comes in two tastes - application and service. The program uses very few resources and can be running on the background on your system, checking your backup schedule and executing your backups when necessary.

Cobian Backup 8 is not an usual backup application: it only copies your files and folders in original or compressed mode to other destination, creating a security copy as a result. So Cobian Backup can be better described as a "Scheduler for security copies". Cobian Backup supports several methods of compression and strong encryption.

The source files of Cobian Backup 8 can be downloaded from Source Forge while Cobian Backup 9 (Amanita) is not going to be an open source software.