Backup complete gmirror/gstripe/gjournal drives, how-to?
Doug Poland
doug at polands.org
Mon Dec 8 08:50:35 PST 2008
On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 05:22:05PM +0100, Ivan Voras wrote:
> 2008/12/8 Doug Poland <doug at polands.org>:
> > On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 10:29:36AM +0100, Ivan Voras wrote:
>
> >> I hope you understand the problems with this kind of backup
> >> procedures.
> >>
> > Actually, I don't, that's why I'm posting :) My intent is to have a
>
> Here are a couple of things:
>
I'd like to reiterate a statement I made in my OP, this is a "one-time"
backup to preserve GEOM metadata. After this, I will use dump and rsync
as I ordinarily do.
> a) How do you intend to restore the images?
>
Booting from a live CD and reversing the dd netcat commands. Something
like:
livecd# nc -l 1234 | dd of=/dev/ad4
backup# gzip -dc /data/backup/ad4.img | nc livecd 1234
> You need drives with >= size of the original drives (and images). If
> you have larger drives, the extra space might be wasted.
>
Understood
> b) With this method you cannot use (or actually, you can but it's very
> hard) any kind of differential/incremental backup, and in addition to
> the used space you're also backuping the unused/"empty" space.
>
My intent would be to use the dd images to restore the disk partitions
and GEOM metadata, then I would use restore to get the latest data.
> c) dd as you've used it will skip bad sectors, in a bad way - it will
> either stop (according to the documentation) or concatenate data
> blocks around the ones containing the bad sector (e.g. if a sector in
> the tenth block of 2 MB is bad, your file will contain blocks
> ...8,9,11,12,...). See conv=noerror,sync options to dd.
>
Thank you for bringing that out. I have seen references to those dd
options while googling this topic. Will using conv=noerror,sync
preserve the disk in a viable state?
Fundamentally, is there a better way to accomplish what I'm trying to
do? Basically a bare-metal backup/restore of a 4-disk RAID-10 built
using gmirror/gstripe with gjournal on top. If my dd solution is too
problematic, I'll do something else.
Your comments and suggestions are very welcome...
--
Regards,
Doug
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