To look at this slightly differently...
You say "simple backups". By that measure, the simplest backup is
replication; I've run rsync against filesystems with 1000000+ files
and it's an excellent solution. Covers you to some degree for things
like hardware errors.
Backups tend to get un-simple when you have more requirements: like,
something got modified last Tuesday. Your Thursday replication
overwrote that file. That's not good.
There's a discussion in Linux Server Hacks (O'Reilly) of a "snapshot-
like" backup that's pretty interesting. I've avoided Amanda, but
implemented Bacula last year and it's a pretty good system but the
overhead is significant if the simple(-er) solutions will work for you.
Tar, Pax, and Dump offer options to do incremental backups. Again,
simpler, and workable if it's just a couple systems. If not:
something giving you better control is going to pay you back.
Hope that helps!
_KMP
On 8 Jan 09, at 16:06 , Richard 'Doc' Kinne wrote:
Hi Folks:
I'm looking at backups - simple backups right now.
We have a strategy where an old computer is mounted with a large
external, removable hard drive. Directories - large directories -
that we have on our other production servers are mounted on this
small computer via NFS. A cron job then does a simple "cp" from the
NFS mounted production drive partitions to to the large, external,
removable hard drive.
I thought it was an elegant solution, myself, except for one small,
niggling detail.
It doesn't work.
The process doesn't copy all the files. Oh, we're not having a
problem with file locks, no. When you do a "du -sh <directory>"
comparison between the /scsi/web directory on the backup drive and
the production /scsi/web directory the differences measure in the
GB. For example my production /scsi partition has 62GB on it. The
most recently done backup has 42GB on it!
What our research found is that the cp command apparently has a
limit of copying 250,000 inodes. I have image directories on the
webserver that have 114,000 files so this is the limit I think I'm
running into.
While I'm looking at solutions like Bacula and Amanda, etc., I'm
wondering if RSYNCing the files may work. Or will I run into the
same limitation?
Any thoughts?
---
Richard 'Doc' Kinne, [KQR]
American Association of Variable Star Observers
<rkinne @ aavso.org>
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