Hi Grant , sorry for late response been under the weather....
Syadmin wrote:
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.
So which one would you recommend , tar or cpio , baring in mind I
haven't used these commands.Could you maybe give a sample command to use?
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.
I see what you mean here , so you would recommend doing only differentials ?
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?
Well , a full backup are about 60GB of data , and this get's done once a
month. I then run incrementals on a daily basis and diffirentials
bi-weekly. We are running some SQL servers with data that is faily
critical , at the moment we are using 3rd party software to backup the
SQL databases to a shared Windows drive and then bacula fetches those
backups. I also backup our file servers ( both Win2000Server) , and our
mail server. As for per workstation backup , I have only done this to
our mission critical users (the CEO :) and some others). As for recovery
, on the database side that is most important , as well as the file
servers. I have done some dummy restores without problems , but to be
honest have not really looked at a whole disaster recovery solution :) ,
which I am thinking is a good idea now.....
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.
Currently I have to shutdown the server , insert the 2 offsite disks
(one for my SQL one for the rest) , copy the volumes over using cp
*cringe* , dismount the offsites , shutdown the server and remove the
offsite disks. Obviously this is not an ideal situation , shutting down
a server every day , so I think I'll look into buying external media
(USB hardrive).
-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
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