During a recent review of LDC’s hardware and systems, its was decided to change backup strategies, as most of us had been using jungleDisk /Amazon S3 for our laptop backups, we decided to give the server version a go.
Well i am very impressed with it, it behaves very much like any enterprise backup solution i have used, you install a bit of agent software on each server then monitor and control the jobs from a separate bit of control software (which is also installed by default on each server). it then backups your choices to your Amazon S3 account (jungle disk them selves do NOT backup your data, although they make the integration to your Amazon S3 account very very easy {as well as giving you about 10 gig of free data per server})
swapping from server to server is easy
and the configuration and job set-up are nearly the same as the standard jungle disk
pricing for the full blow version is $5 per month + what ever S3 storage costs your encure, so very “cloud” (makes a sick noise).
Oh, was immediately asked by Matt white, “does it handle open files?” , the answer would appear to be yes
what is not made so clear is that, if you are backing up a windows machine you need to have the “Windows Volume Shadow Copy” Service running (not an issue with Linux and Mac as they already cope with such things) , the way you can tell if you have missed this step is seeing the following error when tying to back up a locked file
“VSS_E_OBJECT_NOT_FOUND”
but if that is the limit to problems, then I’m more than happy.
Pros
-Cheap
-Easy to use
-Uses Amazon S3 so no more “We cant find the tape”
-You can get to the files directly without the backup software
Cons
-No application specific bolt ons (which might be viewed as a pro)
-Limited granularity of controls
-Obviously heavy on the bandwidth
Domino Appendix
As a largo portion of those who read this blog are IBM Domino users a note on using this on Domino:
Now Domino does not support VSS as far as i know (God knows why not, but i can make a guess) if this IBM note from 2007 is still correct (and judging by this ideaJam.net post it is)
So I’m afraid you are going to have to use the old stand-by’s of ensuring that databases are replicated, and use scripts to flush the cache before backup and/or stop services http,agent manager etc etc, to ensure the databases are handle free. our test restores all worked perfectly (including names.nsf), but as a lot of our stuff in on AWS now we also keep drive snapshots (cant be to careful with client data)
(sigh)