[K12OSN] BackupPPC Question

[Henry Burroughs]

Les,

I was counting on you to respond to the BackupPPC question. ;-p  Thanks!

Now, do you store the backup data on the 250 gig IDE drive, or raid
mirror the 3 external drives (how big are they)?  Could you give me a
little more info about your setup.

Henry
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________
> From: Les Mikesell <les at futuresource.com>
> To: Support list for opensource software in schools. <k12osn at redhat.com>
> Subject: Re: [K12OSN] BackupPPC Question
> Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 16:07:04 -0500
> 
> On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 12:27, Burroughs, Henry wrote:
> 
> > What I want is BackupPPC (or a similar rsync trick to keep multiple
> > days/weeks/months worth of backups) and a way to mirror/replicate the
> > backed-up data onto one or two removable drives (ie: an external firewire
> > drive) so that way I can take a copy of the data (or a good chunk of it)
> > home with me everynight (plug it in the morning and it updates itself)...
> > and then once I get my offsite location, it will act as one of those 
> > "removable" drives and I'll have a 3rd copy.  So basically, i'm looking
> > for a process to replicate the BackupPPC data to X number of removable
> > drives/and or other storage locations.
> 
> I'm doing exactly that with a 250 gig IDE drive and 3 external
> USB/firewire drives that I periodically swap and re-sync.  I'm not
> completely happy with the process but it beats anything else that
> I have tried so far.  The downside is that it takes some manual
> intervention to break and re-sync the mirror and about 8 hours
> to complete, but I only do the swap once a week.  The good parts
> are that except for a quick unmount/remount of the partition, the
> machine keeps working normally during the re-sync and it doesn't
> really care if the 2nd drive is attached or not.  I'm connecting
> to the server over firewire, but can mount the offline drive
> on my laptop via USB and a copy of backuppc there will do a restore.
> 
> I just did an upgrade from FC1 to FC3 on the server and have crashed
> a few times since, always with the firewire mirror running.  FC1 was
> rock-solid (but didn't automatically detect the firewire device) so I
> may go back or try ubuntu.  FC3 seems to auto-detect the drive when
> plugged, but not during a reboot which is what I really wanted so
> the raid would be detected and not have to resync.
> 
> > P.S.  Someone on another list had said something about rsync -H taking
> > an extremely long time to compute symlinks...any experience w/ that?
> 
> Yes, the disk that takes 8 hours to raid-sync would take many days to
> do a file based copy.  There are just no efficient ways to handle the
> number of hardlinks that backuppc uses.  The other technique I've seen
> mentioned on the backkuppc list that might work even better than raid
> is to put the server filesystem on LVM.  Then you can unmount it
> momentarily, create an LVM snapshot and remount.  Then you can do an
> image copy with dd from the frozen snapshot to a matching partition
> on an external drive.  The person doing it said this takes a couple of
> hours with the machine continuing to work.
> 
> -- 
>   Les Mikesell
>    les at futuresource.com
> 
>