support quality (Re: dump | restore fails: unknown tape headertype 1853384566)

[Pete French]

> Absolutely.  You really must use a tool that interacts with the database 
> to perform the backup.  Most commercial DBs have hooks that allow the 
> backup routines to call out to custom snapshot facilities.  One would 
> usually request a backup through the database, which would then freeze IO 
> to its data files and maybe log files, deal with flushing caches etc and 
> then call your snapshot routine.  I'm not aware that MySQL and Postgres do 
> though so the best you can do is a dump.

mysql can do this - you can flush the tables and acuire a lock
simultaneously so that you can then snapshot the uderlying filesystem
and then release the lock to let everything continue. I use this for taking
database snapshots and it works fine. I stop my slaves before snapshotting
to avoid log files changing underneath me too .... like this...

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/mysql -usnapuser -psnapuser <<EOF
        slave stop;
        flush tables with read lock;
        system /sbin/zfs snapshot archive/mysql at latest;
        unlock tables;
        slave start;
EOF

That appears to work fine. I do also do other dumps, but the above
works nicely for a quick and easy snapshot on a slave which can be
rolled back in the case of a crash (and will then update from the master
properly)

-pete.