Jordi Espasa Clofent wrote: > Hi all, > > We (a little webhosting company) are planning to use Bacula in > production as a backup solution. But, first of all we need to resolve > one important and essencial question: > > ¿Is Bacula a reliable method to backup an _active_ databases (normally > it will be a MySQL servers)? > > For example, if I have a box with a MySQL server _active_ just in the > moment that Bacula does their backup job... ¿the resultant copy will be > consistent as a copy you can get with the using of specialized tools as > mysqldump?
Short answer is not easily. Assuming you're using the most common table type of MyISAM, there's no guarantee that the files on disk at any given moment are consistent. Even if you were to take an instant snapshot, you'd just be backing up potentially corrupt data. If you search around, though, you should be able to find solutions that involve briefly locking tables just long enough to create an LVM snapshot of a consistent database, and then backing the snapshot up. Here's one example: http://lenz.homelinux.org/mylvmbackup/ I *believe* that for InnoDB tables, you can take an LVM snapshot of the partition holding the tablespace without locking the tables first, but I've never tried it myself, so you'd want to research this before trusting it as a backup method. -- Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu | For every problem, there is a solution that WPI Senior Network Engineer | is simple, elegant, and wrong. - HL Mencken GPG fingerprint = 6174 1257 129E 0D21 D8D4 E8A3 8E39 29E3 E2E8 8CEC ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
