using samba for backups

[Micheal Patterson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marty Landman" <MLandman at face2interface.com>
To: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 5:00 PM
Subject: using samba for backups


> Maybe a dumb question, but now that I have samba servers on all three of
my
> nix boxes with mapped drives on my two windows workstations there's a
great
> temptation brewing in my mind to backup things directly on mapped hard
drives.
>
> Are there any potential pitfalls to this approach, iow are there any
> compatibility issues that come up if I copy files from a nix box to a
> windows box and vice versa?
>
> On the side it's getting to be such a pleasant development environment on
> my lan that I can't help shake this awful feeling that something's going
to
> mess up big time.
>
> Marty Landman   Face 2 Interface Inc.   845-679-9387
> FormATable  DB: http://face2interface.com/Products/FormATable.shtml
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>


If you're planning on backing up from Windows to Unix, no problem unless
you're using the built in Windows backup system. In order to do a full
recovery from that, even with server 2003, the backup media has to be local
to the server to recover from a full system failure since you can't mount
network shares during the recovery process.

However, if you're planning on backing up from unix to Windows, you'll be
limited to a 4gb maximum file size on a per file basis. This is a problem
with the way that Windows communicates with smbd and it's various other
relatives (sharity, smb_fs, etc). To do this, you'll need to use dump, or
some other package that will allow you to limit the size of the file volume.
Tar won't allow you to do this.  So, for example, if you want to do a full
18gb backup from *nix to windows, you'll need to configure dump to do
something like this:

#!/sh
/sbin/dump -0 -B 2000000 -f
/backups/MAIL2/fri-sys-vol1,/backups/MAIL2/fri-sys-vol2,/backups/MA
IL2/fri-sys-vol3,/backups/MAIL2/fri-sys-vol4,/backups/MAIL2/fri-sys-vol5,/ba
ckups/MAIL2/fri-sys
-vol6,/backups/MAIL2/fri-sys-vol7,/backups/MAIL2/fri-sys-vol8,/backups/MAIL2
/fri-sys-vol9,/back
ups/MAIL2/fri-sys-vol10 /dev/ad0s1a

The above is a direct copy of what I do on a daily basis. That runs dump,
level 0 (full dump) 2gb volume size  -f <all volume files that will be
needed> <device>

This will end up with 10, 2gb volumes for my system backup.

Some would say that it's a waste of space, and it may be, but I prefer full
system backups instead of incrementals due to the specific reasons of this
particular server (HIPAA !UGH!). If for some reason, I need to move the
backup volumes to a single drive, I've got an entire system image from any
particular day of the week to run from instead of a full backup and a crap
load of daily incrementals. To each his own on that route though.

These are things to keep in mind in here. :)

--

Micheal Patterson
Network Administration
TSG Incorporated
405-917-0600