Backup solutions

[Eric Anderson]

Robert Watson wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, Eric Anderson wrote:
> 
>>> FWIW, i have read that by far the best is dump, because of the way it 
>>> deals with the raw data. No need to worry bout files with holes in 
>>> them (with other backup tools, this could mean you may not be able to 
>>> fit the file system back on after backup, if there are core files 
>>> etc) I believe i read this in the O'Rielly text Unix Power Tools, but 
>>> could be wrong. They also referenced an extensive test that was done 
>>> by someone, and gave the link. I will post it if i find it.
>>
>>
>> rsync handles sparse files just fine.
> 
> 
> The problem I've had with rsync is that it wants to build a list of all 
> files to be backed up.  On my cyrus server, I have file systems with >6m 
> files.  This causes rsync to core dump when it discovers it can't 
> allocate memory to hold the entire list at once.
> 
> Recently I've taken to backing up with dump -L, as the snapshot facility 
> means recovery after a failure is a lot easier -- you no longer have to 
> worry about the fact that the first file in a directory might be backed 
> up at 10:00am, and the second at 2:00pm, causing applications to get 
> very upset.

Unfortunately, I don't have that option, since the servers I am backing 
up are linux machines with a custom filesystem that does not support 
snapshots.  rsync is easy on the network, but hard on the disks.

Eric




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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't.
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