Backups

marvin · Post by **marvin** » Sat Jun 14, 2003 12:21 am

This is basically aimed at Phade, but I figured a public forum is nice anyway (so people can tell me what stupid things I'm saying..)

I've been thinking a bit about backups, regarding both vids and the db. Are backups being made at all right now? Off site backups? I'm going to assume the situation is less than ideal, simply because describing "don't change it then" is not much use..

The DB is probably pretty small, so you could just download that daily (a compressed dump of it that is). Please do. And preferably find someone else you trust to have it to download it too.

The video library on the other hand is not small, but it's also free of secrets, and once a video is uploaded it doesn't change. I think there are several people (no not me, people who have jobs) who would be willing to buy the necesarry storage to keep a mirror of them. Using, say, rsync, this is almost no more transfered data than one download per video per mirrorer, which should be relatively little bandwidht..

So, what are the current backup practices, and future plans?

Org Profile · Post by **Phade** » Sat Jun 14, 2003 10:47 pm

Hey Marvin,

The database is currently 415.0 MB uncompressed and about 150 MB compressed. It is manually backed up >1 times per week and burned to CD.

The videos themselves are currently on a single server drive not backed up. This will change with the full Golden Donut server (scheduled to be purchased a the beginning of July). The server will then be RAID 5 with two hot-spare drives. As far as a backup, I'm not sure since the capacity will be quite large (~1T).

Phade.

marvin · Post by **marvin** » Sat Jun 14, 2003 11:08 pm

Phade wrote:The database is currently 415.0 MB uncompressed and about 150 MB compressed. It is manually backed up >1 times per week and burned to CD.

Biggen than I thought.. Anyway, as long as it's reasonably frequent I'm happy.

Phade wrote:The videos themselves are currently on a single server drive not backed up. This will change with the full Golden Donut server (scheduled to be purchased a the beginning of July). The server will then be RAID 5 with two hot-spare drives. As far as a backup, I'm not sure since the capacity will be quite large (~1T).

RAID is not a substiture for backups though. Even if you have complete faith in your hardware (if the RAID controller goes nuts, your data is toast), software (this little thing called bugs) and operators (mistakes do happen) there's still the possibility of some nutcase bombing the server room or a natural disaster of some kind etc.

And it doesn't really matter how big the video library is as long as growth isn't all too rapid. (No reason to transfer videos that were already backed up.) And like I said, no secrets in the video library, so you don't need that much trust in whoever backs it up. Just set up a password protected rsync of it and give the password to some people you trust reasonably who can afford lots of drives..

Org Profile · Post by **Phade** » Sat Jun 14, 2003 11:37 pm

Hey,

marvin wrote:And like I said, no secrets in the video library, so you don't need that much trust in whoever backs it up. Just set up a password protected rsync of it and give the password to some people you trust reasonably who can afford lots of drives..

But we would have to trust them enough that they are not going to sell the vids on eBay and that they would be reliable enought to restore the backup in case of disaster.

Do the vids need backups? Yes. How will we do them? I haven't decided yet. I still need to look at all options.

Phade.