What's good & easy backup software? Are removable USB drives better than tape?

[kanajw]

I teach English at a Japanese university and have a technical background, but I'm a newbie at trying to administer a Linux web server. The technical support people here generally only speak Japanese and don't want to deal with English OSs.

We have some money to purchase hardware and software to give us dependable backups. We also want to store files off-site as our department has fixed ip addresses without a firewall to protect us, and we've been subject to some nasty attacks. (A couple of years ago our department's server was hacked/cracked and we lost some valuable files because we didn't have a good backup system.)

What's the easiest way to backup up a Linux RedHat ES v5 web server? We are using Moodle (a course management system written mainly in php), Apache, php, and MySql. Almost all user-created files are in the Moodle data directories.

We currently have an external USB drive that could be used, but I haven't had the time to figure out exactly how to backup our course files. The cron jobs I tried to setup never run... etc.

One technical friend recommended using backup tapes, but that seems like a rather outdated technology. Also, our environment has limited air conditioning, so we often have the window open (with no screens), so a lot of dirt and dust accumulate quickly... I'm concerned that we might experience tape failures because of the dust.

I've looked at removable disk drive systems, but many [maybe all?] of them don't seem to include Linux support. A couple of double-density Blu-ray disks would probably work, but I don't know if we could get a Blu-ray burner that would work with our old Dell computer.

I think that having a collection of portable external USB drives and rotating them like you would a set of tapes would be a good way to go.

What are people doing to backup a single computer without a lot of files? (I doubt that we have more than 40 GB of user files.)

We want to be able to have a "bare-metal" restore system that almost any computer literate person can accomplish. I've looked at some commercial software, but many of them are designed for client/server systems, which doesn't apply to us.

I'd appreciate your help. Thank you!

[jmadero]

I suggest sbackup, it's simple and you can set it up to backup as frequently as you want.

[rokytnji]

I 2nd jmadero, and you can backup your files daily, automatically, to a external USB Hardrive.

[smolloy]

I use the method explained in this webpage.

It gives a full backup with incrementals, so you can restore a backup from any date you like.

Perhaps you should be devoting some of that cash to a good firewall as well?

[alphaniner]

One technical friend recommended using backup tapes, but that seems like a rather outdated technology.

Wrong. Tape technology is still one of the best means of backup storage, and is constantly being developed and improved. I work for a company that sells tape drives and proprietary virtual tape drive solutions and business is good. It's expensive though. The most popular drive technology as far as our sales go is LTO, and the current generation of that technology (LTO4) runs upwards of $3k for just a bare drive (LTO4 drives at Newegg). It's worth it if you genuinely cannot afford to lose data, otherwise not so much.

And for what it's worth, Linux has native drivers for most every type of tape drive out there. We use Ubuntu for our bench testing.

[kanajw]

jmadero and rokytnji, Thank you for suggesting sbackup. It looks like just what we're looking for. Is sourceforge the best place to download the software?

[kanajw]

smolloy, my colleagues and I like your idea of buying a good firewall. Can you suggest a moderately priced brand &/or model? Thank you!

[root@manabiscuits.org]

In the enterprise I always just use tar and crond to automate backups to tape.

At home; I do the same but to a network share.

[jmadero]

you should be able to get it from the red hat repos if you look up sbackup. I know I got it from the Ubuntu repos.