Re: bkbits.net is down

Joshua Penix
2003-06-28T03:53:52Z

On Fri, 2003-06-27 at 20:19, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2003 at 08:51:40PM -0400, Scott McDermott wrote:
> > Larry McVoy on Fri 27/06 17:16 -0700:
> > > I don't know if you all realize this but at one point we
> > > had corrupted data in several repositories and the backups
> > > were also shot.
> >
> > ever hear of tapes?
>
> bkbits is 45GB of data and growing. Tapes are completely impractical,
> that's why we have hot spares.

Boy you do need a good admin :) Done correctly, tapes are quite
practical for that amount of data. A LTO or SDLT drive would back the
entire 45GB thing up on a single tape, with room for at least one to two
more full backups. Granted, you're not going to have tape act as your
hot backup, but it is a good third line of defense. Plus data backed up
to tape is immune from human or software error that may otherwise affect
the hard-drive based data.

45GB of code is very compressible and I'm sure good chunks of that don't
change on a weekly basis. I'd imagine you could get a weekly or
bi-weekly full backup to tape in the span of about two hours, and then
do nightly differentials which would probably be only 15 minutes in
length. A filesystem capable of doing snapshots would ensure
consistency of the repositories on tape and would prevent you from
having to shutdown bkbits while backing up.

--Josh