continuous backup solution for FreeBSD

[Evren Yurtesen]

Vlad GALU 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 somebody
>> 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 ...

That allows mirroring however not a very practical solution. You would 
need to mirror every drive in another machine and you cant restore the 
drives into a earlier time.

I am talking about a real backup solution where the backup agent 
collecting the information about written sectors and sending to backup 
server. You can then restore a file which existed in the box 1 hour ago 
if you need to.

For example think about a situation where a server is processing 
important data which shouldnt get lost. A software failure wipes out the 
hard drive. You would loose all the data in the mirror as well. Also the 
setup of such mirroring system would be rather complicated. In addition 
to that, the mirroring does not support for example restore of mysql 
databases in table level. Think about a customer who wiped out his 
database accidentally. All the data would be gone in the mirror as well.

With near continuous backup you can restore the data to just moments 
before the deletion process. Traditional backup systems at best daily 
backups, even if you could restore the data, the data could be up to 1 
day old.

More on that subject, r1soft supports multiple hosting control panel 
softwares. For example H-Sphere ( http://www.parallels.com/hsphere/ ) 
etc. through plugins which allow hosting customers to restore their own 
data easily. Something impossible with gmirror+ggate combination (since 
it does not actually backup the data and only mirror it) and not even 
practical if it was possible, if you have thousands of users.

Actually, I am not saying that anybody should be doing about this and 
neither am I an r1soft advocate. I am just pointing out that there is a 
company out there which can provide a valuable software tool and they 
need somebody to put them into right direction only. If you know some 
FreeBSD developers who know the disk subsystem and can help R1Soft then 
you can perhaps forward this information to them.

This not a feature or help request and I just am mentioning this. 
However you can imagine that a company which is giving online services 
on a serious scale probably would be interested in a CDP solution. It is 
currently impossible with FreeBSD. This makes using FreeBSD servers on 
critical applications a little bit insecure data protectionwise thus 
often people prefer Linux which is supported by such continuous data 
protection type backup solutions. (not that I am advocating FreeBSD or 
Linux here but this is the situation).

Thanks,
Evrne