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Backing up the backup to an external USB drive
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John Rouillard
Guest

Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2008 8:58 am Post subject: Backing up the backup to an external USB drive

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 12:35:38PM +0100, Holger Parplies wrote:

Quote:

Hi,

Andreas Micklei wrote on 2008-12-15 10:13:38 +0100 [Re:

[BackupPC-users]

Quote:

Backing up the backup to an external USB drive]:

Quote:

Am Freitag, 12. Dezember 2008 schrieb Rich Rauenzahn:

Quote:

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.

I have and it didn't work using the dump from centos on a 401 GB
filesystem. Errored on a "File too large".

See:

http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=3064

--
-- rouilj

John Rouillard
System Administrator
Renesys Corporation
603-244-9084 (cell)
603-643-9300 x 111

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Rich Rauenzahn
Guest

Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2008 9:03 am Post subject: Backing up the backup to an external USB drive

Andreas Micklei wrote:

Quote:

Am Freitag, 12. Dezember 2008 schrieb Rich Rauenzahn:

Quote:

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.

Since I heavily use lvol, I instead store a vgdisplay -v along with bdf
and mount output.

Rich

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Jeffrey J. Kosowsky
Guest

Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2008 1:00 pm Post subject: Backing up the backup to an external USB drive

John Rouillard wrote at about 16:55:04 +0000 on Monday, December 15, 2008:

Quote:

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 12:35:38PM +0100, Holger Parplies wrote:

Quote:

Hi,

Andreas Micklei wrote on 2008-12-15 10:13:38 +0100 [Re:

[BackupPC-users]

Quote:

Backing up the backup to an external USB drive]:

Quote:

Am Freitag, 12. Dezember 2008 schrieb Rich Rauenzahn:

Quote:

Some of you running dd might want to consider "dump"
[...]

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

I have and it didn't work using the dump from centos on a 401 GB
filesystem. Errored on a "File too large".

OUCH!
That would hurt in a real recovery situation.
Is there any solution? (or warning when you are making the dump at least)

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John Rouillard
Guest

Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2008 2:42 pm Post subject: Backing up the backup to an external USB drive

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 02:27:57PM -0500, Jeffrey J. Kosowsky wrote:

Quote:

John Rouillard wrote at about 16:55:04 +0000 on Monday, December 15, 2008:

Quote:

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 12:35:38PM +0100, Holger Parplies wrote:

Quote:

Hi,

Andreas Micklei wrote on 2008-12-15 10:13:38 +0100 [Re:

[BackupPC-users]

Quote:

Backing up the backup to an external USB drive]:

Quote:

Am Freitag, 12. Dezember 2008 schrieb Rich Rauenzahn:

Quote:

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.

I have and it didn't work using the dump from centos on a 401 GB
filesystem. Errored on a "File too large".

OUCH!
That would hurt in a real recovery situation.
Is there any solution? (or warning when you are making the dump at least)

Nope and nope. I was cloning a BackupPC filesystem, so I went with
copy the cpool and use BackupPC_tarPCCopy and stop backups for a
couple of days while doing so.

--
-- rouilj

John Rouillard
System Administrator
Renesys Corporation
603-244-9084 (cell)
603-643-9300 x 111

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Adam Goryachev
Guest

Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2008 3:28 pm Post subject: Backing up the backup to an external USB drive

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Hash: SHA1

Rich Rauenzahn wrote:

Quote:

Since I heavily use lvol, I instead store a vgdisplay -v along with bdf
and mount output.

On the weekend I had a client with a hardware RAID array which was
configured with LVM with a single PV (4TB) and lots of logical volumes
(LV's). At some point, it crashed due to scribbling random FS data over
the first few blocks of the array. I was eventually able to recover
everything with a bit of dd (copy first few blocks to a file) and vi
(delete everything except a single copy of the lvm.conf data) and
pvcreate (restore the pv info) and vgcfgrestore (restore the rest of the
LV's).

However, what I wanted to point out to everyone, is the usefulness of
keeping a copy of your LVM information. This can be saved with
vgcfgbackup. Also, it is possible to have two copies of your LVM info on
disk, one at the beginning and one at the end. This (IMHO) would
drastically increase your chances of recovering data, since you probably
wouldn't corrupt both beginning and end of your disk. See man pvcreate
for the --metadatacopies which defaults to 1 (only at the beginning).

While I managed a successful restore, it still concerns me that LVM
seems a lot more complicated to recover from than a disk with partitions
and simple filesystems.

Regards,
Adam
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Rob Owens
Guest

Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 10:38 am Post subject: Backing up the backup to an external USB drive

Rodrigo Real wrote:

Quote:

Hi

Holger Parplies wrote:

Quote:

Hi,

Andreas Micklei wrote on 2008-12-15 10:13:38 +0100 [Re: [BackupPC-users] Backing up the backup to an external USB drive]:

Quote:

Am Freitag, 12. Dezember 2008 schrieb Rich Rauenzahn:

Quote:

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.

I thought about something similar a while back. I never got anywhere
with it, but the plan was to use Knoppix or Knoppix-like technology to
have all the hardware automatically detected and configured at boot.
That way the hard drive could be installed in any machine and it would
work.

This info may be outdated: Knoppix has 3 configuration options for a
hard drive installation. The one you would want is called "Knoppix",
and it basically runs the live cd system on a hard drive. All the live
cd startup scripts run, so hardware is detected automatically.

I don't think Knoppix would be the best distro to use, due to its
mish-mash of repositories, but maybe a Debian live cd or Ubuntu live cd
would do the trick for you. I'm just not sure how to install them to
the hard drive in "Knoppix" mode.

-Rob
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Rodrigo Real
Guest

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 6:13 am Post subject: Backing up the backup to an external USB drive

Hi

Rob Owens wrote:

Quote:

The approach I am proposing is a little simpler than that, I only want
to have a bootable usb system which is equal to the backuppc system, and
which could easily replace it. Of course I will not have all the
hardware detection that the liveCDs do, so maybe somethings will still
be done "by hand".

Let me tell you what happened in my tests.

After 33 hours dd'ing the pool to the usb disk, it finally ended, so
I am really considering a eSata case, there is no way to wait 33 hours
each time I want to sync the server with the usb case.

My experience in booting the usb disk was successful, I had some
problems with grub and fstab, which I guess are not easy to avoid.
Depending on how many disks I have on the machine the device is
recognized as sdb, sdd, etc, so I should, at least, dinamically generate
the fstab file, which I am not willing to do right now. By now I could
live with this kind of manual operation.

Below you will find the script I made for doing the sync operation, this
is a very simple script which only solves my problem, but maybe this can
help others and maybe you could help improving it. Sorry for some
portuguese comments...

Rodrigo

#!/bin/bash

/etc/init.d/backuppc stop || exit

umount /var/lib/backuppc || exit

echo "Fazendo backup do /boot"
mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/sdd1 || exit
time rsync -a --delete-after /boot/* /mnt/sdd1/
umount /mnt/sdd1

echo "Fazendo backup do barra"
mount /dev/sdd2 /mnt/sdd2 || exit
time rsync -ax --delete-after --exclude=/proc --exclude=/dev
--exclude=/sys --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/var/lib/backuppc --exclude=/tmp
/* /mnt/sdd2/
mkdir /mnt/sdd2/proc /mnt/sdd2/dev /mnt/sdd2/sys /mnt/sdd2/mnt
/mnt/sdd2/tmp /mnt/sdd2/var/lib/backuppc
chmod 777 /mnt/sdd2/tmp
chmod o+t /mnt/sdd2/tmp
## acertando o fstab
cat <<EOF > /mnt/sdd2/etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb2 / reiserfs defaults 0 1
#/dev/sdb1 /boot reiserfs notail 0 2
/dev/sdb3 /var/lib/backuppc reiserfs defaults 0 2
/dev/sdb4 none swap sw,pri=1 0 0
/dev/hda /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
EOF

umount /mnt/sdd2

echo "Fazendo backup da area de dados do backuppc"
lvcreate -L1G -s -n bkp_snapshot /dev/vg/backup || exit
time dd if=/dev/vg/bkp_snapshot of=/dev/sdd3
lvremove -f /dev/vg/bkp_snapshot

mount /var/lib/backuppc

/etc/init.d/backuppc start

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Tino Schwarze
Guest

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 6:45 am Post subject: Backing up the backup to an external USB drive

Quote:

My experience in booting the usb disk was successful, I had some
problems with grub and fstab, which I guess are not easy to avoid.
Depending on how many disks I have on the machine the device is
recognized as sdb, sdd, etc, so I should, at least, dinamically generate
the fstab file, which I am not willing to do right now. By now I could
live with this kind of manual operation.

You might want to assign a file system label to your backuppc partition.
The label get's copied by the dd, and you can then mount by label. In
/etc/fstab it looks like this:

LABEL=my-backuppc /mnt/backuppc ...

or, if this is not supported (I'm not sure which part of the operating
system needs to support this, probably mount), this should work too:
/dev/disk/by-label/my-backuppc /mnt/backuppc.

You can assign a label using tune2fs -L (for ext2/ext3) file systems.
You can do that online even while the file system is mounted, I'm not
sure how to make the link in /dev/disk/by-label appear instantly,
though. I have a server with LVM here and deactivating/activating the
appropiate logical volume made the label appear correctly.

HTH,

Tino.

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

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

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klemens
Guest

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 6:51 am Post subject: Backing up the backup to an external USB drive

Am Mittwoch, den 17.12.2008, 12:08 -0200 schrieb Rodrigo Real:

Quote:

Hi

Rob Owens wrote:

My experience in booting the usb disk was successful, I had some
problems with grub and fstab, which I guess are not easy to avoid.

you could avoid that sda-problem by using uuid's in the fstab.

.ka

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Rodrigo Real
Guest

Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 2:47 am Post subject: Backing up the backup to an external USB drive

klemens wrote:

Quote:

Am Mittwoch, den 17.12.2008, 12:08 -0200 schrieb Rodrigo Real:

Quote:

Hi

Rob Owens wrote:

My experience in booting the usb disk was successful, I had some
problems with grub and fstab, which I guess are not easy to avoid.

you could avoid that sda-problem by using uuid's in the fstab.

Great idea!

I didn't know I could it, it worked greatly. The only manual thing now
is related to grub, but I guess I will not have a solution for that.

Depending on the disk configuration of the target machine, grub gets the
menu.lst from the wrong disk, or it just don't get the menu.lst file
automatically, so I have to manually load the menu:

root(hd0,0)
configfile /grub/menu.lst

Could not find a way to solve this, but I guess I can live with this
problem.

Thanks,
Rodrigo

Quote:

.ka

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