[H-GEN] System Backup Methods

[James McPherson - Solution Centre Engineer]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and  ]
[ Unix-related topics.  Please observe the list's charter.           ]
[ Worthwhile understanding: http://www.humbug.org.au/netiquette.html ]

Michael Anthon wrote:
>
> Greetings,
> I'm in a position where I need to be able to perform daily system
> backups of a Linux server.  I've managed to kinda sneak our Oracle
> development onto a Linux machine and absolutely must have a reliable
> backup that I can get up and running quickly from.  I have not been able
> to find anything that looked any good in my searching so far and was
> hoping for some pointers from people that do this sort of thing already.
> The system in question is Debain (Woody), running Oracle 8.1.6
> Enterprise Edidtion and Oracle IAS.  It is acting (for the moment) as
> our development repository and application server (running all sorts of
> stuff and coping rather well).  
> As an absolute minimum I would need to do nightly dumps of the databases
> to tape (the server contains a DDS3 DAT drive) and a manual backup of
> the OS whenever I make major changes.  
> As a prefered option, I would like to perform a complete daily system
> backup.  If possible I'd like to do a backup while the database is
> live.  I've previously used ArcServe on NT/Novell systems and this was
> able to do this type of backup, however I've been unable to find
> anything similar for Linux.  If needs be I can shut down most of the
> services and perform a full system backup some time during the night (it
> is, afterall, a development system, not a production system 8^).
> Anyway, any tips/pointers/caveats would be greatly appreciated

Not having had any pleasant experiences with arcserve I can't really speak in 
its favour. As I see it you basically have two options - something like amanda 
(www.amanda.org) or something like legato networker or veritas netbackup. Yes, 
the latter two cost money and at this stage only networker will allow you to run 
with linux as a backup server. In its favour though is that they have just 
released a networker oracle/linux module to allow hot backups etc:

http://www.legato.com/products/protection/networker/networker6/nwmodules/oracle.
cfm

Anyway, what to do? Amanda will allow you to distribute your backups across your 
network and I believe you can set it up to run pre and post backup scripts so 
you can shut down your oracle services prior to backing them up. This is very 
important! Legato Networker will also allow you to do this, but if you fork out 
the cash for the oracle module (which I _seriously_ recommend if you are going 
to use networker) then you can leave the oracle services running while you do a 
hot backup - the module hooks into ${ORACLE_HOME}/lib/libobk.so which you can 
see talked about in the "backup and recovery guide" for oracle. AFAIK amanda 
doesn't have the option to hook in. Netbackup is a different kettle of fish - at 
this point in time you can't use it as anything more than a client and there's 
no oracle backup module available.

I'd recommend that you grab networker and the oracle module - pwc should be able 
to afford it ;)

regards,
James C. McPherson

--
Technical Support Specialist          828 Pacific Highway
APAC Customer Care Centre             Gordon NSW 
Sun Microsystems Australia            2072

Have a Sun Support Contract? - Log/View/Update Calls on the Web
Find out how @ http://www.sun.com.au/service/osc



--
* This is list (humbug) general handled by majordomo at lists.humbug.org.au .
* Postings to this list are only accepted from subscribed addresses of
* lists 'general' or 'general-post'.