[frgeek-michiana] Re: FW: [News and Security Announcements] TKLBAM, a new kind of smart backup/restore
- From: Tony Germano <tony_germano@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 11:14:18 -0400
We don't back up any user PCs. That is probably putting us at risk of losing
some stuff currently, but rather than starting to back them up we're trying to
move in the direction of "anything that you can't afford to lose must be stored
on the server."
I am pretty sure that the cloud solutions that I mentioned below do not do file
dedup across systems like BackupPC does with the hard links. However, this
becomes less important when you are only backing up a few servers, each with
large amounts of data. One of the nice things about the block level dedup is
that if you, for example, make a copy of a 15MB spreadsheet and change one
cell, it only needs to upload the block containing that changed cell, and all
remaining blocks still point to the original copy.
Being a healthcare facility we have to follow all of HIPAA guidelines (to the
best of our ability.) My main concern that prompted looking at cloud backups is
data loss in a total disaster scenario. We can't afford to lose up to a week's
worth of data if the building catches fire. I also wanted to make it as
automatic as possible. It is inconvienent and puts our data at risk to have
someone physically carry something out of the building. Another problem is that
all backups are supposed to be encrypted to NIST standards. If we were to carry
a hard drive containing backups out of the building, the data has to be
inaccessible to anyone that might acquire it.
It's quite an unfun problem.
From: tbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [frgeek-michiana] Re: FW: [News and Security Announcements] TKLBAM, a
new kind of smart backup/restore
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2010 13:29:28 -0400
I have casually researched cloud backups and haven’t seen a compelling product
so I’m glad to hear about your investigations.
Currently I use BackupPC for onsite backups. BackupPC is set to do a full
backup of each PC on our network, over the network, once per week and
incremental (deltas) backups once per day. Each full backup lasts two weeks
before being erased (I can keep more). These are not bare metal disaster
recovery backups because of proprietary Microsoft technology which BackupPC
can’t or won’t afford to license. Once per week I clone the BackupPC config and
data partition to a drive and store the drive offsite.
BackupPC relies heavily on rsync and compression to create pools and hard links
avoid duplicate data. If there are 42 files which are exactly the same on 42
PCs, BackupPC stores one file and 41 hard links. The hard links are the reason
I use Clonezilla to make offsite backups instead of tar, cpio, cp, dd or rsync.
Right now I have 42 systems (PCs), 97 full backups and 247 incremental backups
stored on about 500GB of a 1TB drive. The PC full backups would total 1671GB
before pooling and compression, and the incremental backups would total 367GB
before pooling and compression.
Servers get the Clonezilla treatment although I could use BackupPC on them as
well. Both BackupPC and Clonezilla are open source.
Tom --
From: frgeek-michiana-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:frgeek-michiana-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tony Germano
Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2010 11:38
To: frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [frgeek-michiana] Re: FW: [News and Security Announcements] TKLBAM, a
new kind of smart backup/restore
I have been investigating similar solutions to use for offsite backups at work.
I'm currently looking at Jungle Disk Business Edition
(https://www.jungledisk.com/business/) and CrashPlan PRO
(http://b4.crashplan.com/business/index.html) and hope to try them soon. Jungle
Disk can use cloud storage at Amazon or Rackspace. CrashPlan backs up primarily
to onsite storage for speed and offsite is secondary for disaster recovery. I'm
looking at these two because they have a centralized management console for
backing up multiple servers. Both of these solutions have block level data
deduplication, so if any file has changed you are only uploading a
compressed/encrypted block containing the changes rather than the entire file.
If the contents of two files are identical, you only back up the unique blocks
once and both files point to them. They also support versioning, so you can do
point-in-time restores.
It looks like TKLBAM uses the rsync algorythm to do delta backups within a
file, but I don't see anything saying it does deduplication across multiple
files or supports multiple versions of the same file. Still, it's nice to have
an opensource player in this market.
Tony
From: tbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [frgeek-michiana] FW: [News and Security Announcements] TKLBAM, a new
kind of smart backup/restore
Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2010 14:06:43 -0400
If you use Turnkey Linux, this is great news. If you don’t, it is possible
(probable?) contributors will adapt the open source TKLBAM tool to other
variants of GNU/Linux. TKLBAM is designed specifically for use with TKL servers
in the Amazon EC2 cloud, not sure if it works in other scenarios because the
authors don’t illustrate other scenarios.
Tom --
From: admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2010 08:10
To: tbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [News and Security Announcements] TKLBAM, a new kind of smart
backup/restore system
Dear user,
Big news! We've officially unveiled TKLBAM (TurnKey Linux Backup and
Migration), a new kind of smart automated backup and restore system that will
make it super easy to test your backups "in the cloud", and migrate working
systems anywhere in minutes:
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/announcing-tklbam
Technical documentation:
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/tklbam
Cheers,
Liraz Siri
Co-founder of TurnKey Linux
Cell: +972-54-2013512
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