On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Andrea Venturoli wrote:
Replacing the software would mean replacing the hardware (not only the PCs, but the attached machines too) at multiple sites, which would mean a HUGE amount of money; that's behind my power and is to be considered out of question.
Not necessarily true. How about a web application?
This would mean that the machines would only need to be able to run a web browser. IF they are very old you could install FreeBSD on them. Even a 200MHZ machine can run FreeBSD semi decently with X on it.
It's some bunch of DBFs with associated indexes
If you give me the extensions I can take a reasonable guess at what they are. You CAN copy them. You just need to write a simple program to open them and copy them. Should be near trivial once you have whatever they used.
Given the clients need to be up 24/7, I though of filesystem snapshots as the only solution.
With DBFs that won't work.
You will very likely have corrupted headers if you do a copy/sync/snapshot depending on how busy your system is and how often writes are done to it.
I'll keep trying a bit more, since it seems doing them on a daily schedule doesn't do any harm. The problems so far have only arisen when I manually started a backup script (possibly interrupting it, cleaning up, and starting again).
And you say this system is 24/7? DBFs are not exactly very good at this.. specially if you have many deletes. Is this mostly a read only or write once only type of system?
P.S. The firm who sold that crap, also implemented the file server before mine; just without any RAID and/or backup facility. These data are vital to that business.
Many times it's a matter of how much a client wants to pay. On the last server I setup given the option of getting a RAID controller (IDE) for under $200 the client said no. You can only educate and advice a client so much if they are not willing to listen. The cost of unforseen crashes is usually far off in a small business owner's mind.
-- http://stringsutils.com Utility for developers. Compute length, MD5, CRC and more.
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