Uptime Backup Strategy?

[yosho]

Can anyone give me some ideas for a tape data backup strategy for a system that is used 24 hours a day?

We're a small company with a big foxpro database that is in use almost 24 hours a day. I need a way to capture a good backup of the system without affecting it's uptime.

I've thought of little things from taking the server offline to backup and trying some sort of cluster service. But I'm not sure what needs to be done. I dont have $$ to get some fancy system and would like to find a way to do this cheaply.

thanks..

 

[gwichman]

i'm not familiar with foxpro specifically but i've never heard of a hot backup agent for foxpro so i suspect nobody makes one. However most databases do have functionality to do a hot backup to disk. First thing i would consider is if you can simply schedule hot backups to disk, keeping enough disk space available to support this of course, and then virtually any product can come along and backup that directory. This is often the cheapest and easiest way to backup a database (particularly smaller DB's) as you dont have to purchase an agent and disk space is usually relatively cheap.

If there's no functionality to support that, and the makers of foxpro can't recommend a backup product to backup their product hot because no such product exists, then your only recourse will be to stop the services (can be automated), backup the DB files, and start the services (can be automated). Some people try to narrow this downtime window by stopping their services, splitting their mirrored disks, restarting the services, backing up the copy of the DB on the split mirrored disk, then re-mirroring and building the disks. Of course you run into the possibility of losing a disk while you've got the disks split and losing data.. plus you need the functionality to split disks to be available, which honestly i dont know if windows can do that (its pretty common on unix servers).

anyways thats an overview..