Server down for some days.
Thursday I decided to upgrade Ubuntu from version 6.06 to 6.10, and this was a big misstake.
I was running the 64 bit version of Ubuntu 6.06, and the upgrade should have been smooth, but because of a bug in mysql 64bit, the album and everything else relying on the sql server, went down.
Since I don’t have the money for a backup system, I was left only with the choice of recovering by a reinstall of the server.(hint, hint) 
So I was wondering if I should downgrade to the 6.06 version again, or change to 32 bit.
I have already had some other troubles with running 64bit, so I have now settled for a 32 bit.
I had to set everything up from scratch, however everything should be working now.
If you see something not working, then please let me know.
To explain a bit more what kind of redundancy I’m running.
The server is in my house, so not in a hosting center, this means no UPS, if the power goes in my house, the server goes.
The server itself has 2x250GB drives running in a mirror, this means that all data is existing on both drives at the same time, and if one harddive fails physically, the other one takes over, without any delay, or dataloss.
On this mirror are critical files, such as Mail, Web sites, including the album, here are also my personal file storage located.
Now this setup does not protect against failures such as the one I just had, where an upgrade went wrong.
It also will not protect from mistakes of accidental deleting a file or something, or even worse Fire, lightning or anything else destroying the server.
For this I would need to invest in a backup solution, This is something i really want for the server.
However backup is not cheap, let’s say I would like to only keep a backup of the websites with the albums, and the mails.
Uncompressed, that would be about 25GB, with compression we might get it down to 20GB.
So with taking the future growth into account, I would need a backup solution capable of about 50-60GB.
There are a couple of different solutions for this.
| Type: | Capacity: | Cost: | Comments: |
| On-line backup solutions | Variable | Depends on capacity, but in the range of €200 per month for 100GB | High Availability, and very secure since data is not kept in the same place as server. But also very expensive. |
| DAT Tape streamer | 20-216 GB uncompressed, and 40-432 GB compressed. | €500-$1800 | The solution I’m most interested in since it has no monthly cost and the DAT tapes or relatively cheap. I would also be able to take tapes out of the house to store off site in case of Fire or similar. Unfortunately the initial cost for getting the capacity I need is high, and not something I can afford. |
| An Extra harddrive. | 80-500GB | €49-€300 | The cheapest solution. Problem is that a lightning, or a fire would still be able to destroy the data. |
| A second server, located offsite. | Any | €80-€300 + Any monthly cost. | I have some spare hardware lying around, this I could use to build an extra file server. I could place this server either at my mothers place in Sweden or my Fathers place in Denmark. This is a solution I have been thinking about, but there are other implications in that if something goes wrong, I would not be able to fix it very easy. |
Right now I’m looking mostly on the solution of a DAT streamer, but I do not have the money to invest in this, so for now there will be no backup, I might get an Extra hardrive to keep backups on, but at the moment my finances does not allow any investments.
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