Backup solutions

[Robert Watson]

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.

Robert N M Watson