continuous backup solution for FreeBSD

[Bakul Shah]

On Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:09:06 +0300 "Vlad GALU" <dudu at dudu.ro>  wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 5:33 PM, Evren Yurtesen <yurtesen at ispro.net> wrote:
> > Bob Bishop wrote:
> >
> >>> Does anybody have free time and skills to give a hand? Please see:
> >>> http://forum.r1soft.com/showpost.php?p=3414&postcount=9
> >>
> >> Should be possible to do this with a geom(4) class?
> >>
> >
> > I am not saying it is impossible. They just need somebody to put them to
> > right track I guess. I personally cant do that. It would be nice if somebod
> y
> > who has knowledge in this area contacts r1soft. At the very least r1soft
> > seems to be willing to communicate on this issue.
> >
> > Continuous backups as well as bare-metal-restore seem to be a key feature
> > for many hosters. FreeBSD is loosing users because of this issue.
> 
>    gmirror+ggate come to mind as a nifty solution ...

My guess is these guys do something simpler like keep keep
track of changed blocks since the last backup and
periodically dump those blocks to a server.  This is good
enough for backups (but not mirroring) and it has low memory
overhead (1 or 2 bits per block), lower network overhead than
remote mirroring (you send a block at most once every sync
interval), and a tiny loss of performance (over no backups).
May be someone ought to do a garchive device!