On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 03:44:26PM -0400, Steve Mallett wrote: > Is it possible to do live backups of a running DB with rsync??? > > I was just talking to livevault.com & they (only on win boxes) say they > can grab changes from a client's live DB & sync them remotely. > > It sounded like BS to me, but I'm neither a DB guy or sync'ing expert.
On it's face It sounds like worse the BS. Depending on which BS you can either grow roses or enjoy "the way we were". Generally MS OSs you can't even rsync an open file. As such, to sync tablespaces you have to shut down the database. It could be they are using something like debase where you use a set of libraries to access the data files directly and there is no back end running. The files are only accessed during transactions so you could squeeze an rsync in between accesses. I believe the the MS Access DB[sic] works this way. A service oriented database (Oracle, SQLserver, pgsql, mysql, etc) keeps the files open all the time and even if you can read them the database will be inconsistent. What you may be able to do is to rsync the commit log. This is a common practice in *IX systems. On windows it may be problematic doing this because of locking on open files. This method does work and by replaying the logs whenever they change can be used to keep a running copy of the database almost up-to-date to allow for a limited (the most recent transactions may be lost) fail-over capability. -- ________________________________________________________________ J.W. Schultz Pegasystems Technologies email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Remember Cernan and Schmitt -- To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html