Remote backups, reading from and writing to the same file
Hans Nieser
h.nieser at xs4all.nl
Thu Jan 12 15:25:12 PST 2006
Hi list,
For a while I have been doing remote backups from my little server at home
(which hosts some personal websites and also serves as my testing
webserver) by tarring everything I wanted to be backed up and piping it to
another machine on my network with nc(1), for example:
On the recieving machine: nc -l 10000 > backup-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.tar.gz
On my server: tar -c -z --exclude /mnt* -f - / | nc -w 5 -o aphax 10000
(Some excludes for tar(1) are left out for simplicity's sake)
Among the things being backed up are my mysql database tables. This made
me wonder wether the backup could possibly get borked when mysql writes to
any of the mysql tables while tar is reading from them.
Do I really have to use MySQL's tools to do a proper SQL dump or stop
MySQL (and any other services that may write to files included in my
backup) before doing a backup? Do any of the more involved remote-backup
solutions have ways of working around this? Or is it simply not possible
to write to a file while it is being read?
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