[BBLISA] System Backup thoughts and questions...

[K. M. Peterson]

To look at this slightly differently...

You say "simple backups".  By that measure, the simplest backup is  
replication; I've run rsync against filesystems with 1000000+ files  
and it's an excellent solution.  Covers you to some degree for things  
like hardware errors.

Backups tend to get un-simple when you have more requirements: like,  
something got modified last Tuesday.  Your Thursday replication  
overwrote that file.  That's not good.

There's a discussion in Linux Server Hacks (O'Reilly) of a "snapshot- 
like" backup that's pretty interesting.  I've avoided Amanda, but  
implemented Bacula last year and it's a pretty good system but the  
overhead is significant if the simple(-er) solutions will work for you.

Tar, Pax, and Dump offer options to do incremental backups.  Again,  
simpler, and workable if it's just a couple systems.  If not:  
something giving you better control is going to pay you back.

Hope that helps!

_KMP

On  8 Jan 09, at 16:06 , Richard 'Doc' Kinne wrote:

> 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>
>
>
>
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--
K. M. Peterson                                 voice:  +1 617 731 6177
Boston, Massachusetts, USA                       fax:  +1 413 638 6486
     Full contact information at http://kmpeterson.com/contact.html

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