[H-GEN] Linux Backup

Robert Brockway robert at timetraveller.org
Thu May 8 09:57:33 EDT 2003


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On Thu, 8 May 2003, Tony Melia (DMS) wrote:

> I am (again) looking at a backup/recovery plan for a server I have running.
> There seems to be lots of methods and programs available, from dump to tar,
> and commercial arcserve type programs.  I am wondering what methods people
> are using that work, and can restore a complete system, with permissions
> e.t.c.  I am hoping to do something like a dump to a DDS drive, and,
> assuming a HD dies, be able to boot off a floppy, and do a dump from DDS
> back to disk to recover.  Has anybody had experience they can share on full
> recovery, not just tarring a few important files.  Also, how does it cope
> with open files??

I use dump to do full backups of most systems.  I normally compress the
images, although I wouldn't recommend this if you are going to be using
tape.

Anyway, you are supposed to do dump from single user mode to avoid
problems with open files.  I normally just do it during system idle time
and have not experienced problems as a result.  Never-the-less, I make
sure that I keep many backups around, so that if there was a problem with
an open file a restoration of that file from an earlier dump could be
attempted.

I use a homegrown script to manage this, and use the following incremental
dump procedure:

day 0		level 0 dump
day 1-9		level 5 dump
day 10		level 1 dump
day 11-19	level 5 dump
day 20		level 2 dump
day 21-31	level 5 dump

I stagger these so that different boxes do their level 0 dumps on
different days.

The "Tower of Hanoi" method mentioned in the dump man page is also widely
used.

Be aware that Linus has spoken against dump as a way to backup ext2/3.
He talks about stale date being dumped.  No one has been able to satisfy
me that dump is anymore likely to dump stale data than tar or any other
archival tool.  Despite Linus' comments dump is still actively supported &
developed.

There was a discussion about this a few months back.  You may wish to
checkout the list archive but I can't recall if it is up right now.

I'm now building new boxes with xfs.  SGI officialy recommends backing up
xfs with xfsdump as it knows all about xfs ACLs.

Cheers,
	Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org  ICQ: 104781119
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah

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