LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Richard Russell <richard@yellowgoanna.com>
  To  : Alan Boldock <linux@boldenterprise.com.au>
  Date: 27 May 2002 23:21:06 +0930

Re: Backup policies, standards

howdy,

It's very variable, and usually up to the organisation who owns the
data. Haveing said that, One place where I worked, we had to have a
certainn backup schedule to comply with legislation, but that was a
special case (it was the database that manages all of the land titles in
SA).

Another place, we backed up some servers twice a day, and some
arbitrarily  (six monthly or thereabouts). This was based on the value
and rate of change of the data involved.

If you wanted a rule of sorts, you work out the cost of recovery of
certain losses (everything, all data, all config, a single file, etc),
and their likelyhoods (assume you lose everything once every three years
on each system you are talking about, etc), work out how much $/year
that works out to, and do something that costs less than that.

However, a catch-most strategy is to back everything up nightly, twice.
Take one copy off-site ASAP. Why? Fire. Flood. Theft. etc.

Plenty of people do incrementals nightly, and a full weekly. Bear in
mind that if you end up having to restore a few files, you may end up
needing to feed each tape in, one after the other... Which is annoying.

What I plan to do for my next system is approximately:

nightly on-filesystem backups using rsync (for live backup access)
delete weekday ones after ~1 week, and 3/4 weekly ones after 1 month.
Keep monthlys as long as possible. Nightly backup to tape of the
on-filesystem backup, taken offsite. I may think about that more before
I do it, but that's about the size of it...  :)

rr


On Mon, 2002-05-27 at 22:09, Alan Boldock wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> can some one point me at some policies for backups, 
> or maybe if there are some Quality assured standards
> that others are using? I want to be able to site some 
> standards for a reasonable backup and disaster 
> recovery plan I don't want to re-invent the wheel on 
> this one.
> 
> Thanks
> Alan 
> 
> 
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-- 
Richard Russell
Yellow Goanna P/L
e: richard@yellowgoanna.com
m: +61 412 827 805
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