[CentOS] Backup of large filesystems >500GB

Mon May 27 19:13:23 UTC 2013
Phelps, Matt <mphelps at cfa.harvard.edu>

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Keith Keller <
kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us> wrote:

> On 2013-05-27, Mike Watson <mikew at crucis.net> wrote:
> > I've a small system that I use to support a number of churches. I
> > provide web and email for them. My current server is running CentOS 6.3
> > with paired 1TB drives in a RAID1 configuration. It works well. One
> > filesystem is very large, >500GB, and contains numerous large files:
> > SQL, docs, church libraries in ebook and digital form, plus stored
> > videos of church services.
> >
> > Backup will be to an external (USB) removable HD.
> >
> > Can any suggest a prog or a method to back up this filesystem?
>
> People have already suggested rsync and rdiff-backup; there's also
> rsnapshot which is built on top of rsync.
>
> Another option could be mdadm if your RAID1 is already an mdadm array.
> You can add your USB drive to the array, wait for it to rebuild, then
> remove it from the array.  I'd be wary of backing up an SQL database in
> that way, but I'd be wary of using rsync, dump, or tar too, so be sure
> to take a real backup (e.g., mysqldump, pg_dump) of your database first.
>
> --keith
>
> --
> kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us
>
>
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I'd take the extra step of reformatting the USB drive into an ext3
filesystem, then just use rsync in a nightly cron job.

We do it with about a dozen or so workstations here with user data either
on internal disks, or other external USB drives. Works great.

--
Matt Phelps
System Administrator, Computation Facility
Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
mphelps at cfa.harvard.edu, http://www.cfa.harvard.edu