Question re: server backups - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

GoinAllTheWay · 03-19-2010, 11:12 AM

K, hope I get this out right.

Here at work (family owned business) we have a fairly basic server running Server 03 and about 20 work stations. The server is setup in a RAID type configuration. I'm not the guy who built the server so I'm trying to understand what he built.

As far as I can tell, we have a small system drive (c) that contains the actual OS. If I'm not mistaken, we have a 2nd internal drive (D) (possibly just a partition of C )that mirrors to a removable drive that we hot swap at the end of each day. So basically all the files that we use each day are backed up to this mirror drive in real time. At 5, I shut down this removeable drive, pull in out and replace with an identical drive at which time it starts a rebuild.

So my question is this. If I took one of those removeable drives, pulled it out of its current enclosure and put it into regular HD enclosure and connected it to another computer using USB and fired it up, any reason why I wouldn't be able to access the files on it?

photon · 03-19-2010, 01:13 PM

Hm, I think for mirroring that should work fine. You might have permissions issues accessing files depending on how things are setup though, so you might have to take ownership of the files or directories you are looking for to access them.

As an aside, this really seems like an ineffecient way to do the backups, it has to rebuild the whole array every day, that's a lot of data being re-written to each drive every day. But I guess the guy had a quick recovery in mind (if the internal drive fails, one of the mirror drives can easily slap in and be off in theory).

GoinAllTheWay · 03-19-2010, 01:36 PM

I was hoping you would see this thread, photon. Thanks for the reply

The actual rebuld only takes about 45 mins. It's done after everyone goes home (I'm the last to leave) so it's pretty much sitting idle while it does the rebuild.

It should be simple but I'm not sure the restore would be done in the way you mentioned. I looked at the drive management and it does appear to be a partitioned drive. The O/S partition does not appear to be part of the mirror, only the drive that has all the data.

Permission issues, didn't think of that at all. How does one take ownership of the files?

calumniate · 03-19-2010, 01:51 PM

I'm not going to attempt to solve your problem here, but there is some raid recovery software that's available on the web. Also these days if your internet connection is a good one there are services that can provide you with network backups, probably for a couple hundred bucks a year.

I've recommended this to my PHD friend who fried his hard drive, and had to spend $1000 bucks to get it forensically restored off the disk. Off-site network backups can prevent against fire, hardware issues and just plain old forgetting to change drives!

GoinAllTheWay · 03-19-2010, 01:57 PM

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That is another option I'm looking at but like you said, you would need a pretty good connection. We use Shaw for our internet. It's a "business plan" but I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean our upload speeds are any better than resedential plans so if you have a 100 Gig to backup/day, not sure that would work. That being said, I have no idea how the online backup works so no idea what the process is or how long it takes.

calumniate · 03-19-2010, 02:06 PM

Aww, yeah 100gig is probably pushing it then. And I haven't looked into it much for server environments. Cue the next CP helpdesk guy!

photon · 03-19-2010, 03:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

The actual rebuld only takes about 45 mins. It's done after everyone goes home (I'm the last to leave) so it's pretty much sitting idle while it does the rebuild.

Yeah I guess that's not bad.

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

It should be simple but I'm not sure the restore would be done in the way you mentioned. I looked at the drive management and it does appear to be a partitioned drive. The O/S partition does not appear to be part of the mirror, only the drive that has all the data.

Yeah then the restore wouldn't be quite so easy as swapping a drive, first reinstall OS then swap drive.

For the network do you guys have unique IDs and running an actual Windows Domain and all that jazz? Or is the server just a dumb file server with open permissions? I just ask because while reinstalling the OS is easy re-adding all the users and permissions and stuff would be a real PITA, unless maybe there's a backup going from the OS drive to the data drive as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

Permission issues, didn't think of that at all. How does one take ownership of the files?

If you right click on a folder and choose the Security tab and choose the Advanced... options, there's usually an Owner tab where you can change the owner. This can take a while to do on a big folder with tons of files. It may vary according to client OS so you might have to google it for your specific OS.

Also keep in mind that if you change permissions on the drive, depending on how you have the permissions normally set up on the server you may lose the ability to easily use the drive for a restore.. the files will be there but if the permissions are an important part of who can access what changing ownership may mess that up, so if you did that I wouldn't count on that drive as a reliable restore drive.

If you don't have all kinds of groups and permissions with lots of restrictions and stuff setup for different users though you probably won't have an issue.

photon · 03-19-2010, 03:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

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That is another option I'm looking at but like you said, you would need a pretty good connection. We use Shaw for our internet. It's a "business plan" but I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean our upload speeds are any better than resedential plans so if you have a 100 Gig to backup/day, not sure that would work. That being said, I have no idea how the online backup works so no idea what the process is or how long it takes.

For an online backup you wouldn't be doing 100GB a day (in fact I think running constantly you could probably only upload 8GB in a day for Shaw's 1Mbit upload), it would only upload the changed files, which is typically pretty low since it's just documents, maybe email files, some images, etc.. So it might take a couple of weeks to get all the data uploaded the first time, but once there it'd be able to keep up unless you generate 8GB of brand new data every day.

Unless you are a graphic arts shop with huge files, but only taking 45 minutes to mirror the data drive tells me no to that

mykalberta · 03-19-2010, 03:22 PM

right click your my computer, choose manager and then disk managerment and post a screenshot of that here.

that will tell us what you have.

GoinAllTheWay · 03-19-2010, 03:36 PM

Nope, not a graphics artist. That's my bro and and he has spent well over 100k on his server equipment. Think this server cost us maybe 3k.

Don't think permissions will be an issue based on what you have written. We do have a domain, yes, but it's pretty wide open. As far as user files go, they are pretty much wide open. I suspect I would be ok attaching the enclosure to any client computer in the office and their UN + PW should be able to access them.

We don't really generate much new data/day. For the most part, we just modify client files that already exist. Pretty sure most of our archived .pst files are bigger than our data base files used by our agency software.

I think if we ever had to deal with a disaster restore, I'd make them buy a new server, load a new O/S on, re-install our agency manager software and then move all the client files into the folder they are normally stored. This is why I was wondering if the removeable drives could be accessed this way.

Guess there is really only one way to find out

psicodude · 03-19-2010, 04:10 PM

While this method of backup would work, recovery would be a nightmare as Photon eludes to. The files on that hard drive would be given access to certain SID's of users and/or groups - not actualy "usernames". So, assuming you rebuild the server from scratch after a disaster (which you have to because you are not mirroring the OS) you would then plug in the USB drive and move all of the data over. At this point, you would have to do the take ownership thing that Photon mentioned, which takes a LONG time. At this point, you would have your data, but it would be completely unsecured and unretreivable until you build your ACL's again. Just not an efficient way of doing things.

You should get yourself a couple of large USB drives (like you already have) and get some actual backup software. Even the free stuff would work. This would also give you the ability to go back several versions of a file if you wanted as well.

photon · 03-19-2010, 04:20 PM

Or you could even run the drive unmirrored and still use the drive bay and just use backup software to do daily image backups.

EDIT: I'm surprised sclitheroe isn't in here chanting "RAID isn't backups" yet!

GoinAllTheWay · 03-19-2010, 04:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by psicodude

While this method of backup would work, recovery would be a nightmare as Photon eludes to. The files on that hard drive would be given access to certain SID's of users and/or groups - not actualy "usernames". So, assuming you rebuild the server from scratch after a disaster (which you have to because you are not mirroring the OS) you would then plug in the USB drive and move all of the data over. At this point, you would have to do the take ownership thing that Photon mentioned, which takes a LONG time. At this point, you would have your data, but it would be completely unsecured and unretreivable until you build your ACL's again. Just not an efficient way of doing things.

You should get yourself a couple of large USB drives (like you already have) and get some actual backup software. Even the free stuff would work. This would also give you the ability to go back several versions of a file if you wanted as well.

Wow, ok, few questoins.....

SID's? ACL? What do those stand for?

So assuming I used the method you suggested, how does that avoid all the problems you say could happen if I still had to rebuild the server? Just curious as to why what method of backup you use makes a difference. Does that actual back software alter the files so they are open to any system?

What type of free (or even paid for that matter) backup software would you suggest?

photon · 03-19-2010, 05:28 PM

SIDs are unique identifiers for everything, files, users, groups, etc.

ACLs are Access Control Lists, basically something that tells what things with SIDs have access to what files.

So if you had a complex setup of file permissions, and you did a rebuild of the OS, even setting up new users with the same names won't help because the new users have new SIDs, so you still need to basically reset all the permissions on the data drive from scratch. There are tools like xcacls that make this faster and easier though.

If you used your drives and used a backup software, all those file permissions (SIDs, ACLs, etc) would all get backed up too, so a restore would restore those as well.

Of course you could also accomplish this by mirroring both the data and the OS partition; that way if a drive died the mirrored drive would be in theory bootable and have the copy of your server from yesterday.

There's other software like Symantec, or Arconis, something that does an image of the drive makes for an easier restore (boot the CD, point it at the drive with the backup, wait), but I'm too far removed from this stuff to give an actual software recommendation.

sclitheroe · 03-19-2010, 05:45 PM

In my professional opinion, RAID rebuilds should not be used to do backups this way, if that's what is actually taking place here (check if there's other software installed that is handling the sync, and as others said, post a screeny of Disk Management for us to inspect).

If you are relying on RAID rebuilds to replicate data:

One of these days something truly tragic is going to happen - you're not going to notice that the portion of the mirror that you leave in the system is already failed, and cause an outage, or worse, you're going to reuse an existing backup drive, the RAID controller is going to mistake which drive has the hot copy of the mirror, and you're going to do a rebuild onto the production drive of stale data.

At 20 users, its time to get a proper LTO tape drive (LTO-2 would suffice), and some mainstream backup software like Backup Exec. Reason for going this route is if the truly craptacular occurs, and your office burns down, you can go to almost anyone's small-medium sized shop and borrow/beg/steal their tape drive and software to recover your data, since everyone and their brother runs LTO and Backup Exec.

Just my opinion based on nearly 15 years of enterprise and SMB systems administration.

psicodude · 03-19-2010, 09:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

Wow, ok, few questoins.....

SID's? ACL? What do those stand for?

So assuming I used the method you suggested, how does that avoid all the problems you say could happen if I still had to rebuild the server? Just curious as to why what method of backup you use makes a difference. Does that actual back software alter the files so they are open to any system?

What type of free (or even paid for that matter) backup software would you suggest?

What Photon said.

I am not being a jerk here, but if you don't know what those things are then you will be in a world of pain when that server dies.

I am also not experienced enough with the free stuff to give an opinion on them, but BackupExec from Symantec is pretty much the industry standard for smaller setups like you have. It's far from free, however.

Rathji · 03-19-2010, 09:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by psicodude

What Photon said.

I am not being a jerk here, but if you don't know what those things are then you will be in a world of pain when that server dies.

I am also not experienced enough with the free stuff to give an opinion on them, but BackupExec from Symantec is pretty much the industry standard for smaller setups like you have. It's far from free, however.

We use backup exec for our main backups and it works, but we have a secondary server we use the backup solution that is included with SBS 2003, I can't for the life of me remember what it is called but we don't have any issues with it.

Also, Mozy for off site backups is pretty easy to set up and configure to run in off times. Costs us about $21 bucks a month.

GoinAllTheWay · 03-19-2010, 09:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by psicodude

I am not being a jerk here, but if you don't know what those things are then you will be in a world of pain when that server dies.

Oh, it wouldn't be me doing the work, trust me

I take care of the basic day to day stuff, I know to make a phone call if something like this were to come up.

I only ask cause I kinda dig this stuff and want to understand it better.

In the mean time, due to the age of the server and the fact we will be moving offices soon has me hounding the powers that be at work to let me start getting quotes on a new one.