On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 04:55:11PM -0800, Engel Sanchez wrote:
Hi Alex. My understanding could be wrong, but this is the scenario that I'm trying to avoid:
1) Machine 1 has the original data and backs it up locally to /backup
2) Machine 2 rsyncs /backup to local /backup every day
3) Machine 2 is rsyncing /backup, and right then machine 1 dies for good (fire, flood, apocalypse)
At that point in time, machine 1 is dead and /backup in machine 2 is not a valid rdiff-backup directory, so you can't restore your data from it anymore. If Machine 2 was instead using rdiff-backup on the original sources, /backup would have an incomplete backup, but previous data would not be lost, so you can restore from it even if it was interrupted.
Very true, another example of different horses for different courses. At
any one time I have 3 rdiff backup repos. 1 local machine, 1 local lan
another machine and 1 different location.
the rsync's are done in sequence, so if the source dies the off site one will have a complete backup.
All this does is show how DR / Backups / HA (not all the same) have to
be considered for each case.
A
Engel A. Sanchez
“Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.”
http://engelsanchez.net
----- Original Message ----
From: Alex Samad <alex < at > samad.com.au>
To: rdiff-backup-users < at > nongnu.org
Sent: Wed, December 23, 2009 6:32:37 PM
Subject: Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Safe to mirror backup dir with rsync?
On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 01:58:30PM -0800, Engel Sanchez wrote:
Thank you all for your suggestions! I'm going to go with the solution of doing cascaded rdiff-backups both pointing at the source directories and without rsync and simply spreading the cron jobs to avoid touching the sources while they are updated (the sources are hot copies of a couple of databases and a subversion repo). Using rsync and risking leaving the remote backup in a bad state didn't seem like a great idea to me. (Say rsync's connection breaks and original server fails before next backup). At least rdiff-backup can deal with a partially updated backup if also done by rdiff-backup.
strange for the same reasons I have used rsync - I can capture when it
fails and restart and it doesn't need to roll back it continues where it
left off. rdiff-backup has to unroll and then restart so for a 2 hour
backup that fails in the last 10 min, you will need to do another 2
hours of backup with rdiff-backup and only 10 min with rsync....
to stop the corruption problem right now I use semaphores around my
backup scripts to stop certain things happening at the same time
Alex
Engel A. Sanchez
“Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.”
http://engelsanchez.net
----- Original Message ----
From: Alex Samad <alex < at > samad.com.au>
To: rdiff-backup-users < at > nongnu.org
Sent: Wed, December 23, 2009 4:13:16 PM
Subject: Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Safe to mirror backup dir with rsync?
On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 12:52:03AM +0100, Cybertinus wrote:
Hello,
I'm using rdiff-backup to create the backups of my directories. It all
goes to /backup, which is a external harddrive. Then I'm using rsync to
mirror everything to /backup_sync, which is a second external harddrive.
This one is encrypted and I move it to an external location once a week
(and the disk from the external location then becomes the sync disk
). I'm using this strategy because when I swap the sync disks, they are
disconnected from my computer for a day. Some data I'm backing up every
hour, so I need a external drive at my computer at all times.
This system is working perfectly for me. The only thing I would
recommend is to prevent running rdiff-backup at the same time as rsync.
To prevent that your mirror is accidentally destroyed, because you would
by rsyncing incomplete rdiff-backup data. I haven't build in this
precaution in my backupscripts yet. For the time being I'm preventing it
from running at the same moment by choosing the correct times in my
cronjobs.
Hi
I am doing something similar.
local machine rdiff-backup to /backup (lvm partition).
then a rsync to the local backup server and at the same time a rsync to
an offsite location - via adsl.
I do this because my initial rdiff-backup can happen quickly and cause
the lest disruption - if the source is on a lvm I can take a snapshot
and use that but not all the sources are.
I have come across one problem, if the over adsl takes too long the
rdiff-backup destination on the local machine can change thus giving you
a non in sync backup offsite.
There is another thread asking for a tool to lock the destination to
prevent this
Alex
Cheers,
Cybertinus
On 23/12/09 00:03, Gavin wrote:
Hi Engel,
[snip]
--
Boucher's Observation:
He who blows his own horn always plays the music
several octaves higher than originally written.
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