Re: recommendations for a server-client backup prog

[Alain RICHARD <alain richard equation fr>]

Le vendredi 11 janvier 2002, à 02:01 AM, Christopher Keller a écrit :

> Mark,
>
> I actually backup our partions across a samba link to a large NTFS files
> server. It's pretty trivial using dump/restore. The main "gotcha" is if
> you suffer network issues or the target filesystem goes down. This works
> great for me, as our network is quite stable. I also use dd to mirror
> entire disks, something along the lines of "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
> bs=1024". That actually works pretty well. Not as good as raiding, but
> better than nothing.
>
>
> Here's a sample script from my workstation. I do full backups via a
> cronjob on Sunday nights and do nightly incrementals the rest of the
> week. It's overkill basically, but we have the bandwidth and disk space.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> #!/bin/sh
> /sbin/dump -0 -u -f /net/dogget/ckeller/full.desktop.sda7 -L "/"
> /dev/sda7
> /sbin/dump -0 -u -f /net/dogget/ckeller/full.desktop.sda1 -L "/boot"
> /dev/sda1
> /sbin/dump -0 -u -f /net/dogget/ckeller/full.desktop.sda3 -L "/home"
> /dev/sda3
> /sbin/dump -0 -u -f /net/dogget/ckeller/full.desktop.sda2 -L "/usr"
> /dev/sda2
> /sbin/dump -0 -u -f /net/dogget/ckeller/full.desktop.sda6 -L "/var"
> /dev/sda6

I am also using something similar, but I recommend to pipe the output of 
dump through gzip. This will have two big pluses : the dump takes a lot 
less space on the targeted server and also in some cases it may be faster 
and less bandwith consumming (because you transfert only the gziped data).

For example :

/sbin/dump -0 -u -f - -L "/" | gzip -c 
>/net/dogget/ckeller/full.desktop.sda7.dump.gz

also I like to use autofs (cf /etc/auto.misc) to mount automatically the 
remote directory during the backup and unmount when it is no longer needed.

An other good solution is arkeia backup (www.arkeia.com). They have a 
freeware option to backup a 3 stations network, or a commercial version of 
their product for bigger usage.

Regards,