[BBLISA] System Backup thoughts and questions...

[Richard 'Doc' Kinne]

Hi Folks:

I'm looking at backups - simple backups right now.

We have a strategy where an old computer is mounted with a large  
external, removable hard drive. Directories - large directories -  
that we have on our other production servers are mounted on this  
small computer via NFS. A cron job then does a simple "cp" from the  
NFS mounted production drive partitions to to the large, external,  
removable hard drive.

I thought it was an elegant solution, myself, except for one small,  
niggling detail.

It doesn't work.

The process doesn't copy all the files. Oh, we're not having a  
problem with file locks, no. When you do a "du -sh <directory>"  
comparison between the /scsi/web directory on the backup drive and  
the production /scsi/web directory the differences measure in the GB.  
For example my production /scsi partition has 62GB on it. The most  
recently done backup has 42GB on it!

What our research found is that the cp command apparently has a limit  
of copying 250,000 inodes. I have image directories on the webserver  
that have 114,000 files so this is the limit I think I'm running into.

While I'm looking at solutions like Bacula and Amanda, etc., I'm  
wondering if RSYNCing the files may work.  Or will I run into the  
same limitation?

Any thoughts?
---
Richard 'Doc' Kinne, [KQR]
American Association of Variable Star Observers
<rkinne @ aavso.org>



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.bblisa.org/pipermail/bblisa/attachments/20090108/2a993860/attachment.htm