[CentOS] backup scripts

[Dan Pritts]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 06:06:08PM -0600, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> Guys, the more I use backuppc, the more I like it :)
> 
> http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
> 
> Though it is a PITA to get configured ... 

Huh, I didn't find it to be difficult at all.  

The install script sets a few particular config values for you,
but really you should read the config.pl file and check things out
for yourself.  This takes half an hour.  

the one thing i did run into that i didn't like was that the per-host
config.pl file overrode the exclude value in the global config.pl file,
rather than allowing you to append to that value.

using rsync as the transfer method, the actual implementation was pretty
much trivial once i configured it.

Maybe if you're doing backups of windows PCs there's something harder
about it (i'm sure ;).

ONe gotcha i ran into - on a backup client running x64 RHEL4 , the
/var/log/lastlog file was a sparse file (as normal) but it was insanely
large (presumably due to 64-bit data structures), and the default config
for backuppc did not tell rsync to handle sparse files.  I excluded
the file from backups on that host rather than hack the rsync options,
i didn't know if there was some good reason not to do sparse-file handling.

The only other likely gotcha i can think of is that rsync's memory usage
rises linearly with the number of files being backed up, so on a machine
with lots and lots of files (mail server using maildir mailboxes comes
to mind), rsync will use immense amounts of memory, and you might have
to split the backup job up into smaller pieces so that the backup client
doesn't start swapping while it's running the backup.  This is an rsync
problem, not a backuppc problem per se, but i've seen a couple complaints 
of it on the backuppc mailing list in the few weeks i've been there.

danno
--
dan pritts - systems administrator - internet2
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