Here's our situation. We have about 30 users or so who have a lot of large
graphical files--over 2 TB worth of data.

We are currently using BackupPC to back up three servers. It does a full
backup on Monday and incrementals the other six days. I am considering
expanding this to back up everyone's workstation. My first concern is that
we have enough hardware to do it.

Our current backup server is an old Dell Optiplex GX 240 with a 500 GB
drive. The average rate for three backups (all running at the same time) is
about 16 GB per hour on each server. It's really doing okay for the three
machines, and I am going to add more to it to see what it and our network
can handle.

I'm considering a new backup server and am wondering what hardware I need
for it. I would like to get one with two 100 Mb network cards so they can be
teamed. (Gb cards are useless as all our switches are 100 Mb.) I'm also
looking at getting some SATA drives and going with RAID 5.

I'm also going to divide the full backups into five groups. Some machines
will have full backups on Monday, some on Tuesday, etc.

BackupPC actually recommends software RAID over hardware RAID. Please let me
know what you think.

Once our new backup server is in place and backing up everyone, I would also
like to back up the BackupPC server to tape (probably LTO-4) or an external
hard drive for off-site storage. I have also read that there could be issues
with this. I am probably just going to do one full backup to media per week.
I would also love to hear whatever recommendations anyone has for this.

I'm still wondering if such a backup plan is even possible. We have a lot of
data.

In the past, I have used Lone-tar for tape backup. It is outstanding.

Thank you in advance.

Chris Baker -- cbaker AT intera DOT com
systems administrator
Intera Inc. -- 512-425-2006



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