On Sat, Jan 06, 2007 at 11:37:32PM +0100, chefren wrote:
> On 1/6/07 9:25 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >>i've seen a number of solutions for backing up windows hosts to an
> >>openbsd backup server. there are ~50 windows hosts to backup with an
> >>average of ~10 GB of stuff on each machine. for my purposes a key
> >>feature of such a solution is that it makes FULL backups of the
> >>windows hosts that can be used to replace faulty hard drives with
> >>working bootable replacement drives.
>
> It's very very very difficult to =guarantee= that without backing up
> all those harddisks while Windows and all programs running on it are
> put gracefully down. In general you can only make a really good backup
> of a windows sysstem with the harddisk more or less taken out of that
> system.
>
> For example: rdisk copies on file level and if those files aren't
> closed or synced by the programs that use them those files are
> "broken" and you are just lucky if the broken state is OK to boot from it.
>
> This problem has little to do with OpenBSD although I do hope with all
> "hate" that's in me that once in the future OpenBSD will be the first
> OS with a good database file system, that could solve the problem
> above (provided all programs will use it etcetera), if well designed
> the database managing program can provide proper backups on other
> disks itself.
Don't you mean something akin to Linux LVM's freeze feature, where you
can use a 'frozen in time' version of the disk to make backups from?
IIRC, the LVM stores the original blocks and reads those instead of the
modified ones when used in this way. The programs can continue to run as
always, and dump can do its thing.
Of course, Bad Things Happen once you run out of space to store those
original blocks on... (nothing too bad, but I do believe the 'frozen'
volume is destroyed on the spot).
Also, I believe OpenVMS has a versioned file system. I'm not sure either
of these solutions works well and/or would be appropriate for OpenBSD,
though.
Or did you mean something else entirely?
Joachim
