USB HD based backup schemes
I am hoping that this is on-topic for the questions list. If not, I apologize. I have a couple of FreeBSD systems, and I must confess that I haven't set systematic back-ups of them. I've taken a quick look at both the Bacula and Amanda documentation, but for reasons below I'll list why I don't think that they are idea for my rather simple situation. Each system has less than 20G to be backed up, including OS and ports. One of the systems, dobby, is physically difficult to get to. I would like dobby to be a network client for backup. The other, kreacher, is more conveniently placed, and actually has a cool little USB hard-drive drive dock. I've tested that and it works. I'd like this other machine So far, what I've been doing is running level 0 dumps on both kreacher and dobby. In each case, I've had enough space in /tmp to create dump files in /tmp. When done on kreacher, I've copied them over to a USB drive. The ones from dobby I've scp'ed over to kreacher. At worst I could script this, but it I can't be sure I'll always have the space in /tmp. I need to get the mounting of the USB drive clean and stuff like that. Also, always running Level 0 dumps is bad for a number of obvious reasons. My needs aren't to be able to always have the ability to recover some file to the state it was a week ago Thursday. (I wouldn't mind that, but that's not my primary goal). My primary goal is disaster recovery: In the event of a disk crash, fire, or I really mess up the system. Kreacher will shortly be running mysql-server with a couple of very small databases. Otherwise this are pretty static servers (light mail, DNS, DHCP, light HTTP). Neither machine can hold additional disks internally or is otherwise expandable. Both Amanda seems designed for back-up to tape. Bacula, frankly, seems too complicated. I'm sure that I could roll my own with dump or such, but I'm sure that I would leave important things out and that this has already been done by people who are smarter and more experienced than I am. So recommendations please. -- Jeffrey Goldberghttp://www.goldmark.org/jeff/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: USB HD based backup schemes
2008/4/27 Jeffrey Goldberg [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I am hoping that this is on-topic for the questions list. If not, I apologize. I have a couple of FreeBSD systems, and I must confess that I haven't set systematic back-ups of them. I've taken a quick look at both the Bacula and Amanda documentation, but for reasons below I'll list why I don't think that they are idea for my rather simple situation. Each system has less than 20G to be backed up, including OS and ports. One of the systems, dobby, is physically difficult to get to. I would like dobby to be a network client for backup. The other, kreacher, is more conveniently placed, and actually has a cool little USB hard-drive drive dock. I've tested that and it works. I'd like this other machine So far, what I've been doing is running level 0 dumps on both kreacher and dobby. In each case, I've had enough space in /tmp to create dump files in /tmp. When done on kreacher, I've copied them over to a USB drive. The ones from dobby I've scp'ed over to kreacher. At worst I could script this, but it I can't be sure I'll always have the space in /tmp. I need to get the mounting of the USB drive clean and stuff like that. Also, always running Level 0 dumps is bad for a number of obvious reasons. My needs aren't to be able to always have the ability to recover some file to the state it was a week ago Thursday. (I wouldn't mind that, but that's not my primary goal). My primary goal is disaster recovery: In the event of a disk crash, fire, or I really mess up the system. Kreacher will shortly be running mysql-server with a couple of very small databases. Otherwise this are pretty static servers (light mail, DNS, DHCP, light HTTP). Neither machine can hold additional disks internally or is otherwise expandable. Both Amanda seems designed for back-up to tape. Bacula, frankly, seems too complicated. I'm sure that I could roll my own with dump or such, but I'm sure that I would leave important things out and that this has already been done by people who are smarter and more experienced than I am. So recommendations please. -- Jeffrey Goldberghttp://www.goldmark.org/jeff/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] We used to use RSnapshot http://www.rsnapshot.org/ to backup to an external disk, its a great tool that also does incremental via hard links which is a plus. Its done via rsync, so to recover, you have to reinstall the base OS and rsync the files back to get it up and running again. It may have problems locking active files, I've never tested it with a DB before. But since then, we've moved to bacula. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: USB HD based backup schemes
On Apr 26, 2008, at 3:38 PM, David N wrote: We used to use RSnapshot http://www.rsnapshot.org/ to backup to an external disk, its a great tool that also does incremental via hard links which is a plus. Just after I posted, I started thinking about rsync. I hadn't known about rsync's hard link feature. So once I saw that, the trail did lead me to rsnapshot. The only thing I don't like about it is the security hole it demands of remote machines to be able to back up to them. so to recover, you have to reinstall the base OS and rsync the files back to get it up and running again. I'd be happy with that. It may have problems locking active files, I've never tested it with a DB before. I can also take a DB snapshot before running the dump. But since then, we've moved to bacula. Bacula does look impressive. I'll probably get there some day. If I can deal with the security issue for the remote back-up this will be a perfect solution. If I can't I won't do remote back-up on the machine that is awkward to reach, I'll just have to re-arrange things. Thanks. -j -- Jeffrey Goldberghttp://www.goldmark.org/jeff/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: USB HD based backup schemes
You haven't mentioned how large a USB drive you have available to use for this scheme, but it sounds to me like your situation can be summed up as follows: - you have two machines to back up, one is remote, but both have consistent network accessibility - you have a (removable) drive upon which you want to place regular backups, based on some use of dump/restore, and presumably this drive is large enough for all backup data, to be managed under some rotation scheme (old -vs- current directories, for example) - the main question is how to collect and organize the data onto this (removable) drive on a machine remote from the one being backed up If the above pretty much fits the bill, I would suggest a simple script to be run out of cron to copy the data. Keep in mind that you can easily transfer the data directly from dump to your remote machine by piping it into an ssh command. On your dobby machine, a command of the form: dump 1nuLf - /my/data | ssh -x kreacher /path/to/some/handler/script will present the dump output to a script run on the backup machine that can presumably ensure sane handling of the incoming data and potentially mount your USB device. Passing the mount point on dobby as an argument to your remote script will help you organize things if you have set up multiple filesystems on dobby that you need to dump separately. Note that I am assuming here that you have made a zero level dump and that it will be perpetually available in some safe place. I'm sure that I could roll my own with dump or such, but I'm sure that I would leave important things out and that this has already been done by people who are smarter and more experienced than I am. So recommendations please. As long as you are dumping whole filesystems, I don't really see how you can leave anything out -- recovery is then simply a case of: - boot off an install/live CD - fdisk, label, newfs - restore dump level 0, restore most recent dump level 1 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: USB HD based backup schemes
I've taken a quick look at both the Bacula and Amanda documentation, but for reasons below I'll list why I don't think that they are idea for my rather simple situation. rsync is what you need. while r means remote you may use rsync between local filesystems too. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: USB HD based backup schemes
On Sat, 26 Apr 2008, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote: On Apr 26, 2008, at 3:38 PM, David N wrote: We used to use RSnapshot http://www.rsnapshot.org/ to backup to an external disk, its a great tool that also does incremental via hard links which is a plus. Just after I posted, I started thinking about rsync. I hadn't known about rsync's hard link feature. So once I saw that, the trail did lead me to rsnapshot. The only thing I don't like about it is the security hole it demands of remote machines to be able to back up to them. Take a look at rsync's -e feature. You can use it to pipe its output through an ssh tunnel much as I just posted a moment ago: rsync -e ssh -x ... kreacher:path/to/usb/storage Andrew. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: USB HD based backup schemes
On Saturday 26 April 2008 16:26:53 Jeffrey Goldberg wrote: I am hoping that this is on-topic for the questions list. If not, I apologize. I have a couple of FreeBSD systems, and I must confess that I haven't set systematic back-ups of them. I've taken a quick look at both the Bacula and Amanda documentation, but for reasons below I'll list why I don't think that they are idea for my rather simple situation. Each system has less than 20G to be backed up, including OS and ports. One of the systems, dobby, is physically difficult to get to. I would like dobby to be a network client for backup. The other, kreacher, is more conveniently placed, and actually has a cool little USB hard-drive drive dock. I've tested that and it works. I'd like this other machine So far, what I've been doing is running level 0 dumps on both kreacher and dobby. In each case, I've had enough space in /tmp to create dump files in /tmp. When done on kreacher, I've copied them over to a USB drive. The ones from dobby I've scp'ed over to kreacher. At worst I could script this, but it I can't be sure I'll always have the space in /tmp. I need to get the mounting of the USB drive clean and stuff like that. Also, always running Level 0 dumps is bad for a number of obvious reasons. My needs aren't to be able to always have the ability to recover some file to the state it was a week ago Thursday. (I wouldn't mind that, but that's not my primary goal). My primary goal is disaster recovery: In the event of a disk crash, fire, or I really mess up the system. Kreacher will shortly be running mysql-server with a couple of very small databases. Otherwise this are pretty static servers (light mail, DNS, DHCP, light HTTP). Neither machine can hold additional disks internally or is otherwise expandable. Both Amanda seems designed for back-up to tape. Bacula, frankly, seems too complicated. I'm sure that I could roll my own with dump or such, but I'm sure that I would leave important things out and that this has already been done by people who are smarter and more experienced than I am. So recommendations please. I have the same basic needs. I have been getting some success using (honestly my linux desktop, FBSD 5.4 servers) rsnapshot http://www.rsnapshot.org/ http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/217 Dont get me wrong, I would really prefer a gui setup, which is in fact why I started with rsnapshot as I am using kubuntu and there is a (retrospekt) app to do as winserver2000 to browse and do restores, but now that kde4.0 is out and it doesnt work with dolphin I am just continueing to use it for the backups. I use a desktop search engine to find the files when I need to restore one.. I know not necessarily what you are looking for but just my .02. Mike ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: USB HD based backup schemes
On Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:26:53 -0500 Jeffrey Goldberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm sure that I could roll my own with dump or such, but I'm sure that I would leave important things out i don't know about that, jeffrey. i found dump to be very straightforward and i think it's great you can ssh backups elsewhere. i looked at some of the others (amanda, cpio i think) too and they looked involved to me (admittedly this was several years ago so i don't know if things have changed more recently). -- In friendship, prad ... with you on your journey Towards Freedom http://www.towardsfreedom.com (website) Information, Inspiration, Imagination - truly a site for soaring I's ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
