I'm working on the same problem. here's where i am. Look back through the list archive, others are working on the same problem in the last few weeks.
1) tried just pointing veritas netbackup at the backuppc disk. veritas is fine with hard links, no problem there, but with even 150G used on my backuppc disk, it takes over a day for any backup (incr or full). It got better when i moved from raid5 to raid1 but it's still too slow. Too many disk seeks i guess. 2) I tried ufsdump/ufsrestore (i'm running on solaris - you could use dump/restore with ext or xfs on linux) and dump ran out of RAM making the initial backup. I upped system ram to 2G and it made it through. The dump took a long time but it was not totally unbearable. The restore took over 24 hours, most of it making hard links. again, many disk seeks. I did this when i converted from raid5 to raid1, and the good news was it worked. the bad news, it's unworkable for a true disaster. 3) what i'm doing next (haven't configured it) is just tell veritas to back up the raw device, using the snapshotting feature in solaris UFS. You could do the same thing without snapshots by stopping backuppc and unmounting the filesystem. This should work fine but will eat lots of tapes since it's full every time. I think the veritas "advanced client" can do incrementals on raw devices and i might spring for it but it's not cheap. An idea i had for offsites is to just run rsync against the raw device. rsync would need to be patched to allow this, and apparently rsync has some issues with very large files. Fundamentally, I think that the hard link approach is a very cool hack, but i am hitting limits of it already, and my personal opinion is that a different approach (probably a RDBMS) is called for to index the backend. (night is day, black is white, filesystems are databases). that said i'm a free-rider here, i haven't contributed code and i'm not in a position to. so my opinion is worth what you paid for it. On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 01:19:54PM -0500, Ken Long wrote: > I've been trying to search through this list and through google to > figure out the answer to this question, but have not found a good answer > yet. > > I have BackupPC working great on a nice, large 2.4TB system and it's now > backing up almost everything in the company with a nice rotation set up. > That's great as long as we just need to restore a file or an individual > system, but I need to also protect against catastrophic failure. > > So, what I want to do is to be able to make a backup of the BackupPC > system to tape once a week to send off-site. The idea being that if the > whole computer room goes up in smoke, I can bring in the tape, > reconstruct my backup machine first and then spawn all the other systems > off of that. > > So, what software would anyone recommend to backup a BackupPC server > that will properly handle restoring hard links and will also use an LTO3 > tape library to span multiple tapes? (the server already has about > 700GB on it) I would assume someone else out there is already doing > this, so what works the best? > > Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you!!! > > -Ken > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language > that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast > and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! > http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 > _______________________________________________ > BackupPC-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users > http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ danno -- dan pritts - systems administrator - internet2 734/352-4953 office 734/834-7224 mobile ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
