We really like the IntraDyn RocketVault. It is a terrific solution for small businesses and branch offices despite a few rough edges.
Last week we started with a rant, segued into a review of the IntraDyn RocketVault and wound up talking about the various technologies that underlie the RocketVault. We ended with a discussion of the Common Internet Filesystem.
We’re sure many of you were left wondering: “So where is CIFS in the standards process today?” The answer is, sort of floating around. We can’t find any specific work on CIFS at the IETF, other than some draft standards that exceeded the six-month limit after which they get dropped. Ho hum.
Despite CIFS being in standards limbo, it is now so widely used and so well understood that it is here to stay. In other words, it is “a good thing” (copyright Martha Stewart).
Anyway, back to the IntraDyn RocketVault. We really like this device. It is a terrific solution for small businesses and branch offices despite a few rough edges.
Installation is simple enough: Connect the RocketVault to your DHCP-enabled network, browse to http://rocketvault/, and log on using the default name and password. Configuration is straightforward.
As we said last week, the RocketVault backs up any files that it can see on any SMB/CIFS network shares to which you care to direct it. You start by defining groups of shares and give each group a combination of daily, weekly and monthly back-up schedules.
With each of those schedules, you also specify a retention period that defines the number of backups that will be kept. For example, if you are configuring weekly backups and you select 12 week retention, then when Week 13 rolls around the backup from the first week gets deleted.
The various schedules allow for a hierarchy of restore points. For example, you might have daily backups on workdays with a 4-week retention (that is, one month’s worth). And you also might have weekly backups performed on a Sunday with a 12-week retention, and monthly backups performed on the first of each month with a six-month retention.
Unlike other back-up systems, the RocketVault doesn’t require you to specify whether backups are to be full or incremental – the device determines the best method based upon the number of changed files. The goal is to balance the back-up load so the total run-time of each backup is roughly constant from day to day.
A feature called RemoteVault AES – the AES part signifies that this feature optionally supports encrypting the back-up data using the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard – lets the RocketVault also back up any of the defined groups to a remote FTP server.
A gotcha here is that the RemoteVault facility doesn’t support passwords for remote servers that contain spaces and special characters, a limitation that might conflict with your system’s password policy.
The RocketVault also can be used to synchronize a source and destination at block level in as close to real time as the network and processing capabilities will allow. This feature is called SyncDR and relies on the Unix Secure Shell, SSH and rsync utilities.
We discussed SSH in this column some time ago, but rsync is a new topic for us.
According to the rsync home page, “rsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer.” To put a little more meat on those bones, rsync implements a remote-update protocol that allows for the transfer across a network connection of just the differences between two sets of files using an efficient checksum-search algorithm.
While rsync can be used locally to make file copies on the local machine, its value lies in copying to and from remote machines. In this role, rsync simply can list the files on a remote machine or, more usefully, copy files in either direction between the local machine and a remote machine using a remote shell (such as SSH) at both ends, an rsync server at both ends, or a remote shell at one end and an rsync server at the other.
You can run rsync on Windows but you first need to install the Cygwin system that we discussed in Gearhead some time ago. And even then you won’t be happy, as we are told that rsync on Cygwin will choke on files larger than 2G bytes. Well, darn.
We’ll wrap this up next week. Meanwhile, we’re waiting to hear from you at gearhead@gibbs.com. And have you checked Gearblog this week? If not, why not?
