Chris Adams wrote: > Once upon a time, John Summerfield <[email protected]> said: >> You cannot make good backups of files that are open for writing, unless >> the application (eg dbms) itself can make the backups. > > If you install on LVM, you can make backups that are at least as good as > "yank the plug". If you have a database server that can flush and > freeze on command (e.g. in the simple case MySQL), you can snapshot the > filesystem and release the database. This takes just a moment (no > shutdown required). > > The only thing you can't currently do with Linux LVM is to freeze and > snapshot all filesystems simultaneously. So, if you have actively > updated data spread across multiple filesystems, it may not work the way > you want. > > The only filesystem where you can't use LVM is /boot, but I mount /boot > read-only except when loading updates, so it is always consistent.
Thanks to all who replied so far. I'm currently testing mondorescue, although only in VMWare at the moment. Ed Brown made the suggestion that I should use kickstart and a good config mgmt. system like puppet. This would probably be the ideal solution, however to get correct, updated kickstart configs for all the servers as well as collecting config files into puppet and getting people to work through that seems like a lot of work. I'll post here how I get on, I might also ask the mondo mailing list or forum about the online backup issue. To clarify, the data on those machines is backed up by another mechanism. I just need to get the boot loader, partitioning layout and operating system up and running so that the data backups can then be restored. Tim _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
