Backup Central

I am currently testing rsnapshot as a solution to provide versioned
backups of our user files. I am using cifs.mount to mount shares on a
Win2K3 server. I then use rsnapshot locally. I know that it seems like
this should be slow, but I am seeing snapshot times of about an hour on
450GiB+ of data. I have dug down into the snapshots, and all the data
seems to be there, and usable. So my question is, apart from the
possible speed issues, are there any problems with this method?

The other question is regarding archiving the entire snapshot tree. As
I said before, our data itself is about 450GiB, and the snapshot tree is
~500GiB. I would like to take an archive of the entire tree every few
weeks on tape. It looks like the tar.gz process could take over 50
hours, and I was wondering if there is another way... I have considered
an rsync to another server, but we would still like to be able to get
this versioned backup tree to tape some how.

Any thoughts?

--
Daniel Shackelford
Systems Administrator
Technology Services
Spring Arbor University
517 750-6648




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On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 02:11:11PM -0400, Daniel Shackelford wrote:
I am currently testing rsnapshot as a solution to provide versioned
backups of our user files. I am using cifs.mount to mount shares on a
Win2K3 server. I then use rsnapshot locally. I know that it seems like
this should be slow, but I am seeing snapshot times of about an hour on
450GiB+ of data. I have dug down into the snapshots, and all the data
seems to be there, and usable. So my question is, apart from the
possible speed issues, are there any problems with this method?

Whenever you have two alien environments like Windows and Unix-a-likes
you can expect to lose at least some of mode bits / ACLs / ownership /
group ownership and possibly have timestamps go a bit weird cos not all
systems have the same clock resolution. And specifically in the case of
Windows using NTFS, files copied to Unix machines may lose any extra
streams that they have. Streams are rarely used though, indeed the only
time I've ever seen them used has been in demonstrations of how they
break :-)

The other question is regarding archiving the entire snapshot tree. As
I said before, our data itself is about 450GiB, and the snapshot tree is
~500GiB. I would like to take an archive of the entire tree every few
weeks on tape. It looks like the tar.gz process could take over 50
hours, and I was wondering if there is another way... I have considered
an rsync to another server, but we would still like to be able to get
this versioned backup tree to tape some how.

dump/restore may be a little faster, but I'd not expect it to be much
better. Unfortunately, dump works with *filesystems*, not with
directories, so you can't just dump (say) weekly.3. On the other hand,
it does mean that you can dump all your snapshots at once, complete with
hard links, thus dumping your entire snapshot history to tape.

Unfortunately, dump/restore isn't available everywhere, and has some
fairly serious caveats:
http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html

FreeBSD man pages:
http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=8&topic=dump
http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=8&topic=restore
HOWTO:
http://www.freebsddiary.org/dump-restore.php

If you use tar to take a copy of one of your older snapshots, which you
won't expect to get removed or renamed while tar is running, then that
will certainly be a safe operation and will result in a good tape
backup. Sitting next to the tape drive and feeding it for 50 hours will
suck for your PFY though :-)

--
David Cantrell | Reality Engineer, Ministry of Information

I hate baby seals. They get asked to all the best clubs.


-------------------------------------------------------
Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security?
Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier
Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642
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