Once upon a time, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> said: > On 4/3/20 8:34 AM, John Pierce wrote: > >Do note, backup systems that use rsync or similar file by file copies of a > >running system do not make coherent atomic snapshots, so things like > >relational databases should be excluded from those, and backed by database > >tools > > Long ago I learned to back up databases by dumping them (with a flag > "lock" or similar to make sure no changed are made during dump), and > backing up dump file. It isn't just databases - there are other things that backing up individual files one at a time is not so good. The best way to handle that is to freeze/snapshot the whole filesystem, and then back up the snapshot. This can be scripted pretty easily if the filesystem is on LVM. Even better is to freeze _all_ filesystems simultaneously - this is usually easiest if the system is a virtual machine and/or the storage is on a SAN with snapshot capabilities. -- Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>