Need tips on archiving on BSD 4.3

[Kral]

In article <11737 at bsu-cs.bsu.edu> koffi at bsu-cs.bsu.edu (There will be enough room in HEAVENS for all of US) writes:
>
>I need some tips on archiving on BSD 4.3. What are the things you usually do
>when you are archiving. 

The way I see it, there are two types of "archving" meant when people ask this
question.  The first is disaster recovery backups, the second is offline
archiving of data you want to keep.

We use a rather simple procedure for the former:  daily backups go to disk of
everything modified in the last 24 hours.  Each day has a separate directory on
a partition set aside just for daily backups.  (NOTE: it would be more prudent
to do 48 hour backups so there are always two copies of most files - space
currently limits us from doing so).  These backups are then put to tape twice
a week or so, as space dictates, and the tapes are kept on site for around 6
weeks.

Each weekend we do a dump.  Twice a month we do fulls, one for off site
storage, the other for onsite storage.  The later is for major disaster
recovery.  The tapes are kept for two years, with January and June's being kept
for 7 years.  The former is for quick recovery of minor disasters (accidental
deletes, disk crashes, etc).  The other weekends we do weekly incrementals to
the last onsite full.  On site tapes are currently kept for around 6 mos,
depending on the used tape pool.  Weeklies are done on recycled tape, fulls are
done on new tape.

Special archives are simple: done with tar and disposed as the users dictates.

I'm really interested in hearing comments on this and other methods.

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kral * 408/647-6112 *               ...!uunet!drivax!braun * braun at dri.com
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