I believe Carl is "the-man" on this subject, but I'll put in $.02 Check out the O'reilly Backup book - it has lots of good information, procedures, etc. Also, SAGE and USENIX might have some best practices that you can use as a starting point. The cost of your back-up solution should be reflective of the monetary value of the data. The frequency of your backups should reflect how quickly the lost data loses value. No sense doing nightly backups for something that changes weekly (too frequent), and no sense doing weekly backups for data that is worthless if it's more than a day old (not frequent enough). 70Gb burned to CD? Ick. Also, transferring 70Gb to your off-site location might take awhile. Over a T-1 it will take more than 100 hours (70,000MByte = 560,000 MBit / 1.5 MBit = 373,333 sec = 103h). DLT4 can do 35Gb raw/70Gb compressed on 1 tape. Tapes are about $60-$70 each (last I bought them anyways). I think you can get DLT4 drives for under $1,000 now. As all I've ever used is DLT and Travan, I can't comment on capacity or performance of the other solutions that are out there. On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Duncan Shannon wrote: > Hello List- > > We are growing our datacenter... We are at 3 servers now, plan to add 3 > more soon, and maybe up to 10 over the next year. > > We are trying to evaluate our backup options. Id like to hear what the > list has to say... > > We see: > > 1. copy some files nightly to a central server (that is out of the > datacenter, but in the same building :) ) and burn them to cd every now > and then. Its about 70 gigs of data right now. > > 2. Put tapes on each machine, get lots of tapes. > > 3. Get a nicer tapedrive that can backup several machines on one tape > > are there other options that we should look at? > > thanks > duncan > > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > Adam Maloney Systems Administrator Sihope Communications _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list