Holy Snikeys! That sounds link no fun at all. First of all, doing a cp -v --preserve=all is not sufficient for backups, at the minimum you need to use tar (you do not need to make a tar archive, you can pipe with tar and just use it as a transport and archiving medium) or cpio. Cp will break under certain conditions and if there is a problem with any data on the disk it will simply fail, where as tar is designed to do mass archives so it will not break no matter how large (there are limits) the directory structure is and cpio will copy bad sectors happily.
Doing incremental and differentials is kind of a waste of time as the differential will do all the same work as you're incremental's so you are doing the work over again. Differentials do incremental backups based on changes from the last full backup, where as incremental just save changes from the last incremental backup. How much data are you backing up from how many servers? What kind of recovery ability do you want to have as that will dictate what kind of backup methods you need to use, for example we do web hosting so I need to be able to provide full backups of several weeks (we all know hosting customers are notorious for updating sites with bad data and then not knowing about it for a while...) as well as provide reasonable backup and recovery times so the 1 full and 6 diff's fit our needs. What are your backup and recovery needs? Of course it is easier to automate the backup and restore processes with scripts or bacula, but if all you want to do is archive the data with minimal recovery, all you REALLY need to do is use rsync and mirror the data from one disk to another then you can rotate those mirrors as often as you wish. -Grant -----Original Message----- From: Danie Theron [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 10, 2006 2:19 AM To: Syadmin Cc: 'Bacula-Users' Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] Some advise needed Hi , Yes I only run disk based backups. I run one full backup monthly , with differentials every second week and then incrementals weekly. My offsites I use a straight 'cp -v --preserve=all' to copy those over to an offsite disk of which I have 3 I rotate. The copying is quite a lengthy process (creating dirs etc) , was wondering if won't be easier to automate it with either a script or bacula. Syadmin wrote: > I take it you do not have a tape library or a drive, so you are doing > backups to disk? > > What do you WANT to have happen? What is your offsite procedure? > > I have a 10 tape library and I run a full once a week and swap out those > full tapes on a weekly basis so I always have 4 weeks of full backups in the > library and a 5 week off site. > Are you trying to accomplish something like the above? > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Danie Theron > Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2006 9:49 AM > To: Bacula-Users > Subject: [Bacula-users] Some advise needed > > Hi All , > > I've been using bacula for a while now , and need to do a harddrive > (SATA) upgrade (or shall I say bluntly I'm running out of disk > space!).My problem is , I only have a 2U server (4 300GB SATA in RAID 5 > array) , and 2 trays for my offsite disks.So , to briefly explain my > setup (and please tell me where I need to specify more): > > 2U Intel Server with SATA RAID controller > OS - Fedora Core 3 , resides on the RAID 5 array , 4 300GB Seagates (not > sure if it's the safest bet) > Bacula version - Version: 1.38.0 (28 October 2005) > > For the offsites (and once again probably not the best way , any > suggestions?) , I pop in the disk , mount it and then copy over the > previous nights volumes. This however I've seen is quite tedious , and > could possibly get confusing and difficult to manage. Would it be > possible to rather setup a USB/Firewire disk , with a mount point for > offsites and let bacula then backup the volumes? > > OK , so basically I need some advise on how to move forward with either > this setup , or rethink my strategy. Also I must add I'm not an expert > at this and it's basically been given to me to sort out. > > TIA > > Daniel > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language > that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast > and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! > http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 > _______________________________________________ > Bacula-users mailing list > Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language > that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast > and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! > http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 > _______________________________________________ > Bacula-users mailing list > Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users > > ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
