Backup Strategy - Suggestions from Del, January 09

Since the box in a data center where we don't necessarily
have adequate backup facilities, I think the second box is a must have.

The backup strategy should involve:

* Having sufficient capacity within the LVM VG to create a snapshot
partition (i.e. don't do the standard RHEL thing and fill the entire
primary VG with one single LV holding the root filesystem, leave about 20%
space free in the VG).

* Stop database, create (read only) snapshot), start database, backup the
snapshot (using rsync or whatever) every day in a script around 4am.

* Backup other non-static files (group web sites, mailboxes, etc) via
rsync around once every 2 hours.

* Periodically (once every month or so) use a tool like mkcdrec to make an
ISO image of the system that can be used for boot-and-restore.  This
doesn't need to restore anything other than the base system, as everything
else can be recovered from the backups.

The backup scripts should be located on and run from a *different* 
server to the primary server (i.e. frankie contains none of its own 
backup scripts) and executed remotely via ssh.  In our network we have one
machine that does nothing other than runs backups for the other machines.

You can look at using backula or various other backup tools but I've never
found one that does a better job than the above.