Backup solutions?

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Wed, 26 Oct 2005, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:

>
> GAH:  Disregard my reponse regarding using dump
> and restore.  I found a link stating that use of
> these programs are not recommended per response
> from Linus Torvalds himself.
>
> Here is the reference:
> http://www.europe.redhat.com/documentation/rhl9/rhl-sap-en-9/s1-disaster-rhlspec.php3

you can substitute cpio for dump in what you planned to do and it will 
work, that will give you a filesystem rather than block-level copy of the 
contents of your disk, it's still not safe for some running applications 
like databases but under most circumstances it works pretty well.

There is also I believe a dump-safe version of xfs out there.

> Dan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com
> [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com]On Behalf Of Jon D. Slater
> Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 9:40 AM
> To: For users of Fedora Core releases
> Subject: Re: Backup solutions?
>
>
> Welty, Richard wrote:
>
>> i suggest that you actually work out some requirements for your
>> backup system ("not so paranoid" is a little light on the details).
>>
>> the usual concerns are things like this:
>>
>> natural disaster (fire? flood? etc.)
>>
>> man made disaster (theft? arson?)
>>
>> power or network failure (handling this implies remote site)
>>
>> archival requirements (do i need to go back in time?
>>   how far back? how granular?)
>>
>> archival usually puts you into tape. remote backup site generally
>> pushes you towards some sort of rsync replications solution.
>>
>> be aware that you can't simply rsync an rdbms, you need to do a dump
>> and then restore or store the dump file as needed. alternatively,
>> there are replication solutions for most rdbms systems (for both
>> MySQL and PostgreSQL in the open source world, don't know about
>> Firebird.)
>>
>> if you end up going archival with tape/cd/dvd, be sure to regularly
>> check the media to make sure it works. i am aware of cases where
>> the sysadmins made bad tapes due to a bad drive for months and months,
>> assuming things were ok because the system didn't error when the
>> tapes were cut. oops.
>>
>> richard
>>
> Hi Richard,
>
> You are absolutely right...  I should have supplied more details.
>
> My requirements are minimal.  I have two machines (1 - FC4, and 1 - XP)
> that I'd like to back up.
>
> I don't need any archival on either machine.  My primary concern is hard
> disk failure.
>
> FC4 box requirements:
> The FC4 box is running several websites with accompanying mySQL db's.
> The websites are all maintained under individual logins, under /home
> Everything else on the machine could recovered easily enough, so the
> only backups would be of /home and the mySQL db's.
>
> I've gotten the XP backup worked out.
> I use the Windows backup utility to a mapped Samba drive.  (Which works
> fine for me.)  I do a repeating cycle of 1 complete backup followed by 6
> incremental backups, done daily.  Then I re-use the same files every 7 days.
>
> In the event of a drive failure, I don't mind being down for a bit (even
> a few days), but I'd hate to lose any of my content.
>
>

-- 
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Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu
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