Kory,
Greetings...
Backup and recovery is a concern for me so I am curious about your ability
to shut down "for about an hour" each night to backup everything. I, too, am
under the impression that everything must be backed-up in sync to be
reliable, but how is that possible given the typically large amounts of data
(and, typically, multiple servers that are involved)? Could you share some
of the specifics of your installation and approach?
My environment has approximately 230GB of data in the vault and, even
though it is on a fiber-based SAN, it takes roughly 2 hours to copy from one
LUN to another across the SAN backplane; several hours if the data passes
through the server (from one mounted volume to another). Naturally, to go
from the disk copy to tape is a painfully long process. Our system is small
by comparison, so I am curious how backups are typically handled.
Compounding the problem is the lack of an adequate backup window - we have
design centers in Asia and Europe so there is only about a 90 minute block
in the early evening where designers are not actively using some part of the
system.
