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The traditional way to send logs to tape backup as I understand it is to mount a NAS which has the ability to do tape backups (or maybe send to a syslog server which in turn mounts a NAS).

Is there a way to backup to tape without mounting a NAS? (Which makes sense in an enterprise environment).

David
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2 Answers2

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A NAS is is a fileserver. Period.

To reduce shoe-shining, backup systems frequently back up data to a disk pool first, and then when they have enough data accumulated to fill a tape, they'll relocate that backup job to tape all in one session. The disk pool could be a NAS, or it could be a dedicated array of disks connected to a backup server.

This is not specific to logs, but to any type of data you're backing up.

Hopefully this answers your question. If it doesn't please specify exactly what you are trying to accomplish here, without letting extraneous details get in the way and confuse things.

Edit: For web logs, two mechanisms come to mind to back them up.

  1. Centralized logging. You should have centralized logging in place anyway. Just configure apache to log via syslog and then you have one server which you back up all of your logs on.
  2. Logstash/Elasticsearch - this is becoming more of a frequent use pattern. Run logstash on your webserver, which ingests your access logs, and then ships them off to an Elasticsearch instance for long-term storage and search.
EEAA
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  • My perception is that mounting network storage on all of your servers is a messy set up, so I'm trying to get a feel of what the best practice out there is for archiving logs, specifically in the context of Apache logs. Sorry for the ambiguity. – David Apr 21 '15 at 23:23
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    @David Please see my edit. – EEAA Apr 21 '15 at 23:51
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For example:

ssh www tar c /var/log > /dev/st0

Or use Bacula (or some other full featured backup software), which is very convenient later, but it takes a considerable time to learn. Setting up the client software on a single machine however is less than a minute if it is packaged for your OS.

Hontvári Levente
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