[CentOS] Simple backup program

Dan Pritts

danno at internet2.edu
Fri Jul 14 07:04:38 UTC 2006


On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 02:37:16PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-14 at 12:45, Bowie Bailey wrote:
> > > 
> > > You are going to have more trouble than that.  Backuppc will have
> > > millions of hardlinks in that 161GB and nearly all file oriented
> > > backup programs will take an impractical amount of time to deal
> > > with them.  And restoring will be even worse - basically everything
> > > ends up building a table of inode numbers and scanning it for a match
> > > on every hardlink.
> > 
> > True, but this will only be used as a last-case scenario for restores,
> > so in that case I'm willing to wait a bit.
> 
> Try it before you need it.  I'll guess that 'a bit' will turn out
> to be at least several days.

replying late to this thread - but i definitely concur with Les.
You will NOT be happy with the restore performance for any file-based
backup utility you try to use on your backuppc file store.

My suggestion if you really want to back up to tape (which i generally
agree is a good idea) is unmount the filesystem and back up the raw
device.  Or use LVM snapshots to do that, or whatever.  i use solaris
for backuppc so i use ufs snapshotting.

You might first fill the free space on the disk with a bunch of
highly-compressible data (eg, dd if=/dev/zero of=fnord bs=1M count=1024
to create a 1G file of nulls).   that will allow your tape drive's
compression, or gzip or whatever, to get the best out of it.

In addition to backuppc we use veritas netbackup.  I've been considering
buying the veritas "advanced client" which will do incrementals of raw
devices.  you probably don't want to go down the netbackup route if you
don't have it already but you might check for similar solutions.

btw, Les mentioned "an identical hard disk" as your backup copy.
It doesn't have to be really identical, just as big or bigger than
the backup store.

danno
--
dan pritts - systems administrator - internet2
734/352-4953 office        734/834-7224 mobile



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