Backup Central

Hello,

I've been quiet for some months, but I've been trying to read the
messages in the way I can.

Now I am running to the list to ask a question that has been discussed
here some time before (maybe many times), but I could not find a
solution that fits exactly on my needs, maybe I wasn't able to identify
it...

Let me tell you the full story...

I have a backuppc server with 3 250GB Sata disks running in Software
RAID-5 with LVM built on top of it. This systems is been running for
quite some time now. This server is in a different building from where
we have most of our computers and our servers. But now we got a little
more paranoid, so we want to backup the backuppc server, and take it
home. We want to do this process at least once a month, by now we don't
believe that we need a greater frequency.

So, I bought an USB external drive with 500GB and now I am thinking
about what is the best way to do it.

My first attempt is to dd each partition of the backuppc server and save
it as files on the usb disk. This seems to be a simple solution and
maybe it is good enough. But I was wondering if it wouldn't be possible
to dd the entire installation, and have a sort of "LiveHD". That would
be really good and easy to use in case of panic.

My installation looks like this:

/dev/mapper/vg-root on / type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/md0 on /boot type reiserfs (rw,notail)
/dev/mapper/vg-backup on /var/lib/backuppc type reiserfs (rw)

I am thinking about creating 3 partitions on the usb hard drive and to
dd each of this disks to its corresponding partition. I guess that this
could work, but I see that there will be some issues:
* After dd I will have to mount the usb system and adjust fstab
* I will have to boot on the system on a liveCD to do this, or I will
have to remount the root system as read-only to run dd
* install grub on the usb disk (never did this...). maybe some
adjustments on menu.lst will be needed.
* don't know if I can boot the usb drive directly on any computer ( I
guess that this is not a problem since I can get a "not old" computer)

What do you think of this? Does it seems to be reasonable?

Thanks for any comments or help,
Rodrigo

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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Rodrigo Real wrote:
Hello,

I've been quiet for some months, but I've been trying to read the
messages in the way I can.

Now I am running to the list to ask a question that has been discussed
here some time before (maybe many times), but I could not find a
solution that fits exactly on my needs, maybe I wasn't able to identify
it...

Let me tell you the full story...

I have a backuppc server with 3 250GB Sata disks running in Software
RAID-5 with LVM built on top of it. This systems is been running for
quite some time now. This server is in a different building from where
we have most of our computers and our servers. But now we got a little
more paranoid, so we want to backup the backuppc server, and take it
home. We want to do this process at least once a month, by now we don't
believe that we need a greater frequency.

So, I bought an USB external drive with 500GB and now I am thinking
about what is the best way to do it.

My first attempt is to dd each partition of the backuppc server and save
it as files on the usb disk. This seems to be a simple solution and
maybe it is good enough. But I was wondering if it wouldn't be possible
to dd the entire installation, and have a sort of "LiveHD". That would
be really good and easy to use in case of panic.

My installation looks like this:

/dev/mapper/vg-root on / type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/md0 on /boot type reiserfs (rw,notail)
/dev/mapper/vg-backup on /var/lib/backuppc type reiserfs (rw)

I am thinking about creating 3 partitions on the usb hard drive and to
dd each of this disks to its corresponding partition. I guess that this
could work, but I see that there will be some issues:
* After dd I will have to mount the usb system and adjust fstab
* I will have to boot on the system on a liveCD to do this, or I will
have to remount the root system as read-only to run dd
* install grub on the usb disk (never did this...). maybe some
adjustments on menu.lst will be needed.
* don't know if I can boot the usb drive directly on any computer ( I
guess that this is not a problem since I can get a "not old" computer)

What do you think of this? Does it seems to be reasonable?

Thanks for any comments or help,
Rodrigo

Step 1) Use LVM's snapshot feature to take a snapshot of your root and
backuppc partitions.
Step 2) dd the snapshot to the two partitions on your USB HDD

You won't be able to boot from the USB directly, because as you said,
you would need to install grub, adjust the menu.lst, etc to make it
work. If you had a USB drive larger than 500GB, eg, a 750GB drive, then
you could do so much more

ie, setup the 3rd partition as the "active" partition, install grub to
this partition, and configure the menu.lst file as needed. Then use the
first two partitions the same as above.

BTW, I think LVM will ensure your FS is in a good state when you do the
snapshot... if not, then you may like to try and ensure you do a sync,
and try to ensure no backups/etc are in progress (ie, the system is as
idle as possible).

Either way, you should be able to boot from a livecd of some sort, but
then use the root FS on the USB, plus some adjustments to the rootfs...

Oh, and in case you were thinking about it, you could just archive the
latest backup to the external drive... though it only gives you a single
backup...

Hope that helps...

Regards,
Adam
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BTW, I think LVM will ensure your FS is in a good state when you do the
snapshot... if not, then you may like to try and ensure you do a sync,
and try to ensure no backups/etc are in progress (ie, the system is as
idle as possible).

Snapshotting a live file system will probably trigger an fsck if you
boot from it. And that will take some time for such large partitions.

Tino.

--
"What we nourish flourishes." - "Was wir nähren erblüht."

www.lichtkreis-chemnitz.de
www.craniosacralzentrum.de

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Hello Adam

Adam Goryachev wrote:

Step 1) Use LVM's snapshot feature to take a snapshot of your root and
backuppc partitions.
Step 2) dd the snapshot to the two partitions on your USB HDD

You won't be able to boot from the USB directly, because as you said,
you would need to install grub, adjust the menu.lst, etc to make it
work. If you had a USB drive larger than 500GB, eg, a 750GB drive, then
you could do so much more

I was thinking about running a small shell script that would do this
adjustments just after the end of the copy process. This script would
mount the usb partitions e edit those files.


ie, setup the 3rd partition as the "active" partition, install grub to
this partition, and configure the menu.lst file as needed. Then use the
first two partitions the same as above.

This is a good idea, and would simplify the process.

Re-structuring the thoughts, maybe I could do:

1 - copy the /boot and root partitions just once in a while, or maybe
rsync it in a low frequency, excluding the files that should be adjusted
2 - in a higher frequency take a snapshot of the backuppc lvm volume
to the usb drive

This way I guess some problems would be solved:

* I don't have to take a snapshot of a mounted and live root system,
which I guess would cause problems (as said by Tino)
* I don't have to make that script to adjust everything everytime I do
a backup

The only problem I see is that I don't have disk space to make a
snapshot and after it to dd the file to the usb disk, I never used this
snapshot feature, I will see if I can redirect the file as a pipe
directly to the usb drive.

I will try to follow this way and see where it takes me. It would be
very confortable to have this sort of ready to use system.

Let me know ff you have any other ideias, I will send news soon about this.

Rodrigo

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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Rodrigo Real wrote:
Hello Adam

Adam Goryachev wrote:
Step 1) Use LVM's snapshot feature to take a snapshot of your root and
backuppc partitions.
Step 2) dd the snapshot to the two partitions on your USB HDD

You won't be able to boot from the USB directly, because as you said,
you would need to install grub, adjust the menu.lst, etc to make it
work. If you had a USB drive larger than 500GB, eg, a 750GB drive, then
you could do so much more

I was thinking about running a small shell script that would do this
adjustments just after the end of the copy process. This script would
mount the usb partitions e edit those files.

ie, setup the 3rd partition as the "active" partition, install grub to
this partition, and configure the menu.lst file as needed. Then use the
first two partitions the same as above.

This is a good idea, and would simplify the process.

Re-structuring the thoughts, maybe I could do:

1 - copy the /boot and root partitions just once in a while, or maybe
rsync it in a low frequency, excluding the files that should be adjusted
2 - in a higher frequency take a snapshot of the backuppc lvm volume
to the usb drive

This way I guess some problems would be solved:

* I don't have to take a snapshot of a mounted and live root system,
which I guess would cause problems (as said by Tino)
* I don't have to make that script to adjust everything everytime I do
a backup

If a script can fix it properly, why not do it on the same frequancy
(if you can solve problem 1) ?
The only problem I see is that I don't have disk space to make a
snapshot and after it to dd the file to the usb disk, I never used this
snapshot feature, I will see if I can redirect the file as a pipe
directly to the usb drive.

You could always reduce your FS size, to make space for the
snapshots,.... depending on your pool size/etc....

Regards,
Adam
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Hi,

Adam Goryachev wrote on 2008-12-12 11:09:14 +1100 [Re: [BackupPC-users] Backing up the backup to an external USB drive]:
Rodrigo Real wrote:
[...]
Adam Goryachev wrote:
The only problem I see is that I don't have disk space to make a
snapshot and after it to dd the file to the usb disk, I never used this
snapshot feature, I will see if I can redirect the file as a pipe
directly to the usb drive.

You could always reduce your FS size, to make space for the
snapshots,.... depending on your pool size/etc....

I think the point to point out is that making an LVM snapshot does not involve
copying the whole partition. You need a limited amount of free space in the VG
- enough to hold the changes to the LV during the life time of the snapshot.
LVM presents to you the (unchanging) snapshot on the one hand and the normal
(read-write) LV on the other hand, both as block devices. You do *not* get a
file containing an image of your LV (well, you can create that yourself, but
there is no reason to do that). The difficult part is to figure out beforehand
*how much* space you will need for the snapshot. That depends on how long you
need the snapshot and how much write activity on your LV will occur during this
time. If you can do all of it outside of your backup window, you will need
virtually no space for the snapshot, but then again, you wouldn't really need
a snapshot in this case .

That said, you *will* need *some* space in your VG, so if it's all allocated
right now, you will need to reduce the size of your root or backup volumes.
On the bright side, that would mean you have some spare space on your USB disk
for a live root partition.

Regards,
Holger

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Hello,

Holger Parplies wrote:
Hi,

Adam Goryachev wrote on 2008-12-12 11:09:14 +1100 [Re: [BackupPC-users] Backing up the backup to an external USB drive]:
Rodrigo Real wrote:
[...]
Adam Goryachev wrote:
The only problem I see is that I don't have disk space to make a
snapshot and after it to dd the file to the usb disk, I never used this
snapshot feature, I will see if I can redirect the file as a pipe
directly to the usb drive.
You could always reduce your FS size, to make space for the
snapshots,.... depending on your pool size/etc....

I think the point to point out is that making an LVM snapshot does not involve
copying the whole partition. You need a limited amount of free space in the VG
- enough to hold the changes to the LV during the life time of the snapshot.
LVM presents to you the (unchanging) snapshot on the one hand and the normal
(read-write) LV on the other hand, both as block devices. You do *not* get a
file containing an image of your LV (well, you can create that yourself, but
there is no reason to do that). The difficult part is to figure out beforehand
*how much* space you will need for the snapshot. That depends on how long you
need the snapshot and how much write activity on your LV will occur during this
time.

Yesterday I read a little about the LVM snapshot, I didn't know that LVM
had this feature. When I read that suggestion I thought that snapshot
was a sort of dd. By now I am running a dd on the snapshot, I opened
some space on the lvm by reducing the root size and created the snapshot.

If you can do all of it outside of your backup window, you will need
virtually no space for the snapshot, but then again, you wouldn't really need
a snapshot in this case .

Currently I believe that I can stop backuppc and perform the copy of the
data, but I don't know if in the future it will still be possible, so I
am trying to do everything considering that the data may change while I
am performing the copy.

That said, you *will* need *some* space in your VG, so if it's all allocated
right now, you will need to reduce the size of your root or backup volumes.
On the bright side, that would mean you have some spare space on your USB disk
for a live root partition.

Yes, I have space for everything on the USB HD, I tested the boot from
it, and it worked fine, so I guess that this idea will work greatly.

I intend to publish this recipe on the Backuppc Wiki, I guess that Tips
&Tricks is a good place for it, am I right?

Rodrigo

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Rodrigo Real wrote:
The only problem I see is that I don't have disk space to make a
snapshot and after it to dd the file to the usb disk, I never used this
snapshot feature, I will see if I can redirect the file as a pipe
directly to the usb drive.
You could always reduce your FS size, to make space for the
snapshots,.... depending on your pool size/etc....
I think the point to point out is that making an LVM snapshot does not involve
copying the whole partition. You need a limited amount of free space in the VG
- enough to hold the changes to the LV during the life time of the snapshot.
LVM presents to you the (unchanging) snapshot on the one hand and the normal
(read-write) LV on the other hand, both as block devices. You do *not* get a
file containing an image of your LV (well, you can create that yourself, but
there is no reason to do that). The difficult part is to figure out beforehand
*how much* space you will need for the snapshot. That depends on how long you
need the snapshot and how much write activity on your LV will occur during this
time.

Yesterday I read a little about the LVM snapshot, I didn't know that LVM
had this feature. When I read that suggestion I thought that snapshot
was a sort of dd. By now I am running a dd on the snapshot, I opened
some space on the lvm by reducing the root size and created the snapshot.

If you can do all of it outside of your backup window, you will need
virtually no space for the snapshot, but then again, you wouldn't really need
a snapshot in this case .

Currently I believe that I can stop backuppc and perform the copy of the
data, but I don't know if in the future it will still be possible, so I
am trying to do everything considering that the data may change while I
am performing the copy.

To make the filesystem clean, you really should stop backuppc and
unmount the archive partition during the copy. With the snapshot
approach you'd only need to have it unmounted for the time it takes to
make the snapshot, but realistically, most machines will be almost
unusably slow during a partition copy to usb (at least for anything
using the source partition), so you won't gain that much by letting
backuppc continue to run.

I do something similar with raid1 mirroring, stopping and unmounting
just long enough to break the raid, but performance is horrible if a
backup runs during the mirror sync.

--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell < at > gmail.com


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Adam Goryachev wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Rodrigo Real wrote:
Hello Adam

Adam Goryachev wrote:
Step 1) Use LVM's snapshot feature to take a snapshot of your root and
backuppc partitions.
Step 2) dd the snapshot to the two partitions on your USB HDD

You won't be able to boot from the USB directly, because as you said,
you would need to install grub, adjust the menu.lst, etc to make it
work. If you had a USB drive larger than 500GB, eg, a 750GB drive, then
you could do so much more
I was thinking about running a small shell script that would do this
adjustments just after the end of the copy process. This script would
mount the usb partitions e edit those files.

ie, setup the 3rd partition as the "active" partition, install grub to
this partition, and configure the menu.lst file as needed. Then use the
first two partitions the same as above.
This is a good idea, and would simplify the process.

Re-structuring the thoughts, maybe I could do:

1 - copy the /boot and root partitions just once in a while, or maybe
rsync it in a low frequency, excluding the files that should be adjusted
2 - in a higher frequency take a snapshot of the backuppc lvm volume
to the usb drive

This way I guess some problems would be solved:

* I don't have to take a snapshot of a mounted and live root system,
which I guess would cause problems (as said by Tino)
* I don't have to make that script to adjust everything everytime I do
a backup

If a script can fix it properly, why not do it on the same frequancy
(if you can solve problem 1) ?

You are completely right, no reason for not synching everything...

The only problem I see is that I don't have disk space to make a
snapshot and after it to dd the file to the usb disk, I never used this
snapshot feature, I will see if I can redirect the file as a pipe
directly to the usb drive.

You could always reduce your FS size, to make space for the
snapshots,.... depending on your pool size/etc....

Yes, I reduced the root system and the snapshot backup is running right now.

Rodrigo


Regards,
Adam
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Hi

Les Mikesell wrote:
Rodrigo Real wrote:
The only problem I see is that I don't have disk space to make a
snapshot and after it to dd the file to the usb disk, I never used this
snapshot feature, I will see if I can redirect the file as a pipe
directly to the usb drive.
You could always reduce your FS size, to make space for the
snapshots,.... depending on your pool size/etc....
I think the point to point out is that making an LVM snapshot does not involve
copying the whole partition. You need a limited amount of free space in the VG
- enough to hold the changes to the LV during the life time of the snapshot.
LVM presents to you the (unchanging) snapshot on the one hand and the normal
(read-write) LV on the other hand, both as block devices. You do *not* get a
file containing an image of your LV (well, you can create that yourself, but
there is no reason to do that). The difficult part is to figure out beforehand
*how much* space you will need for the snapshot. That depends on how long you
need the snapshot and how much write activity on your LV will occur during this
time.
Yesterday I read a little about the LVM snapshot, I didn't know that LVM
had this feature. When I read that suggestion I thought that snapshot
was a sort of dd. By now I am running a dd on the snapshot, I opened
some space on the lvm by reducing the root size and created the snapshot.

If you can do all of it outside of your backup window, you will need
virtually no space for the snapshot, but then again, you wouldn't really need
a snapshot in this case .
Currently I believe that I can stop backuppc and perform the copy of the
data, but I don't know if in the future it will still be possible, so I
am trying to do everything considering that the data may change while I
am performing the copy.

To make the filesystem clean, you really should stop backuppc and
unmount the archive partition during the copy. With the snapshot
approach you'd only need to have it unmounted for the time it takes to
make the snapshot, but realistically, most machines will be almost
unusably slow during a partition copy to usb (at least for anything
using the source partition), so you won't gain that much by letting
backuppc continue to run.


I am feeling it right now, I umounted backuppc partition and the load of
the machine is 4! So it is almost impossible to do anything else with it...

Rodrigo

I do something similar with raid1 mirroring, stopping and unmounting
just long enough to break the raid, but performance is horrible if a
backup runs during the mirror sync.



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Yesterday I read a little about the LVM snapshot, I didn't know that LVM
had this feature. When I read that suggestion I thought that snapshot
was a sort of dd. By now I am running a dd on the snapshot, I opened
some space on the lvm by reducing the root size and created the snapshot.


Some of you running dd might want to consider "dump"

On the other hand...

http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html

Although some of the arguments apply to dd as well.

Rich



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Am Freitag, 12. Dezember 2008 schrieb Rich Rauenzahn:
Some of you running dd might want to consider "dump"
On the other hand...
http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html
Although some of the arguments apply to dd as well.

I have been doing that for about two years now. Works great! It's just like
dd, only faster and more space efficient. However you can only dump
partitions, not the whole disk, so I also save the output of fdisk -l, so I
can recreate the partition table in case of disaster. Booting a live cd and
using restore is quite easy if I need to.

regards,
Andreas Micklei

--
_______________________________________

Andreas Micklei
Software development, Network engineering

IVISTAR Kommunikationssysteme AG
Sachsendamm 6
10829 Berlin, Germany
Tel: +49 (0 30) 44 67 82 22
Fax: +49 (0 30) 44 67 82 23

www.ivistar.de
mailto:andreas.micklei < at > ivistar.de
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Hi,

Andreas Micklei wrote on 2008-12-15 10:13:38 +0100 [Re: [BackupPC-users] Backing up the backup to an external USB drive]:
Am Freitag, 12. Dezember 2008 schrieb Rich Rauenzahn:
Some of you running dd might want to consider "dump"
[...]

I have been doing that for about two years now. Works great!

I've been meaning to ask/point this out for some time now. Has anyone actually
tried *restoring* a dump of a *reasonably sized* pool? The reason I'm asking is
that as far as I understand the man page, restore runs completely in user
space, so it is faced with the same problem as cp/rsync/tar - the need to keep
an inode-to-path-name mapping for correctly re-creating hardlinks. It is
possible that restore can handle this problem, but I wouldn't take it for
granted without testing.

It's just like dd, only faster and more space efficient. However you can
only dump partitions, not the whole disk,

... and it's dependent on the file system, so you can dump ext2/ext3 file
systems (and maybe some others - with the specific dump program for that file
system, that is), but not necessarily *any* file system you might be using.
The fact that restore runs in user space may or may not mean that you can
restore to a different file system type. That would also be interesting to
know ...

so I also save the output of fdisk -l, so I can recreate the partition table
in case of disaster.

Why not 'sfdisk -d'? You should be able to feed that directly to 'sfdisk' to
recreate the partition table (which, of course, is most useful with an
identical target disk).

Regards,
Holger

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Hi

Holger Parplies wrote:
Hi,

Andreas Micklei wrote on 2008-12-15 10:13:38 +0100 [Re: [BackupPC-users] Backing up the backup to an external USB drive]:
Am Freitag, 12. Dezember 2008 schrieb Rich Rauenzahn:
Some of you running dd might want to consider "dump"
[...]
I have been doing that for about two years now. Works great!

I've been meaning to ask/point this out for some time now. Has anyone actually
tried *restoring* a dump of a *reasonably sized* pool? The reason I'm asking is
that as far as I understand the man page, restore runs completely in user
space, so it is faced with the same problem as cp/rsync/tar - the need to keep
an inode-to-path-name mapping for correctly re-creating hardlinks. It is
possible that restore can handle this problem, but I wouldn't take it for
granted without testing.

The restore issue is the reason that targets me to a sort of live system
which I can easily test and use any time I want. I prefer to waste some
time more while doing the backup and than to do a fast backup and spent
a lot of time to recover it in case of "disaster". That's why I want to
have this live USB-HD.

Cheers,
Rodrigo


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Considering how slow USB can be, you may want to consider eSATA. We've been
doing quite well with it here.

Chris Baker -- cbaker < at > intera.com
systems administrator
Intera Inc. -- 512-425-2006



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