Anyone who has a Mac is familiar with Time Machine, the almost magical, continuous backup capability of OSX. What many people may not know is that Time Machine is based on concepts which have been freely available for quite some time and which can easily be applied to corporate-wide backups. Because corporate backup is considered expensive to implement, many companies have outdated legacy backup systems based on tapes, tape-robots and offsite transport and storage of tapes. These systems are hopelessly outdated and can no longer keep up with the every increasing storage capacity of the disks they should be backing up and the decreasing backup time window in which backups should be completed.
We have approximately 3TB of data (consisting of about 40 databases, 200 virtual machines and hundreds of thousands of files) on our servers and workstations which need to be backed up. About a year ago we installed a comapny-wide backup to disk with offsite replication and versioning which has been providing us with continuous backup ever since. It continuously replicates a 4TB local RAID-6 disk-array offsite to a versioning 5TB RAID-6 disk array over a dedicated 4Mbps line, 24 hours a day, using rsync for the replication and snapshots based on Linux filesystem hard-links for versioning. Its implemented entirely on standard Linux components (zero license costs) and has been running without a glitch for over a year. Thanks to this system, we not only have an offsite backup of all business-critical data, but we can step back to any version of a database or virtual machine from yesterday, two days ago, four days ago, a week old, a month old etc. I can’t imagine why any company would still want to install a propietary backup system when such perfect technology is freely available.