SUNScholar/Disaster Recovery

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 *** WARNING ***  

''' Since your archive is now the vehicle for maintaining the permanent digital academic research record of your institution, you will be concerned about it's sustainability !!! You will want to make sure it is backed up and monitored correctly !!! '''

Strategy
''The backup strategy depends on whether you use virtual/cloud servers or bare metal servers. Please read below for options.''

Bare metal servers
We initially used a virtual server but quickly found out that the virtual server on VMWare, suffered very badly with performance, therefore we moved to a bare metal server for our production server and also decided to use bare metal servers for our backup servers.

We initially identified two old servers that had passed their warranty period and had enough disk space to use as the backup servers, but now due to vastly increased disk usage we have acquired two twenty terabyte (20TB) capacity backup servers named:
 * arc.bib.sun.ac.za => backup 1
 * ark.bib.sun.ac.za => backup 2

Virtual servers
''' Speak to your campus virtual systems administrator about the capacity to take snapshots at regular intervals. '''

If your server is virtualised, then ensure that a snapshot is taken at appropriate intervals to a remote storage location.

There is no need to apply any of the backup procedures if you take snapshots of the virtualised system.

However if you choose to run a bare metal server for best performance reasons, then you are strongly encouraged to follow the "server backups" procedures headlined above.

Alternatives

 * https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/ReplicationTaskSuite
 * https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-replicate
 * http://wiki.lib.sun.ac.za/index.php/SUNScholar/Export_and_Import_Artifacts