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.