Once upon a time, David Palmer <dwpal...@cazenovia.edu> said: > I am looking at ways to speed up our backups as our data continues to > grow. We currently have an equallogic group that stores much of our > information. One idea that we had for speeding up backups is to have a > file server that is separate from our production file servers and > mounting the data volumes as read only for backups. I am not planing to > use this for anything but file servers (ie sql / mail). > > My question is has any one done this or something similar? Are there any > disadvantages that by configuring it this way for our file servers?
I back up a volume from an Equalogic SAN like this. You do have to be careful; you should limit visibility of the base volume to the active server and the snapshot to the backup server, or "odd" things can happen (depending on OS, filesystem, etc.). You also need a way to create a consistent filesystem snapshot. For example, my volume is used by a Linux server and contains an LVM volume. My snapshot script connects to the server and creates an LVM snapshot first, connects to the SAN to create a SAN snapshot, and then removes the LVM snapshot on the server. The SAN snapshot volume is then mounted on the backup server. Without LVM, Linux also has the "fsfreeze" command to sync a filesystem (flush all pending writes and hold new writes). You could freeze the FS, create the SAN snapshot, and unfreeze. -- Chris Adams <cmad...@hiwaay.net> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware, SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial. Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications! http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
