[Gllug] Production system - Linux 2.4.24, LVM and cciss

[Simon A. Boggis]

On Mon, 2004-01-12 at 11:02, John Hearns wrote:
> I think it is possible to do the archival/recovery funtion these days to
> disk arrays. Me, however, I'd still like to have something in a drawer
> with a date written on it.

Agreed (that's early morning emails for you) - I am a daft bugger,
particularly as I actually do this myself (duh!). So I hereby eat some
selected words (:

You could of course arrange to do many incrementals into each disk,
giving you cover for accidental deletion and corruption, in which case
your remaing disadvantage is that for N disks (where N is usually much
less than M tapes) you have quite a lot of eggs in each basket.

I in fact do copy to big disks across the network to complement my tape
backups by using a hard-link-and-rsync strategy, but I don't think of
them as my "backups" - they save me doing tape restores on
user-finger-slips.

Our whole strategy is something link this:

  afternoon: on "disk backup server" copy directory structure from
    yesterdays on-disk-backup to
    a tonight's archive directory; fill this with sym-links to files.
    The archives are kept on a normal PCs with four big IDE hard drives 
    (v. cheap for the experiment).

  evening: rsync from fileserver to new archive directory - due to rsync
    copy-then-move any changed hard links are replaced with new copies,
    leaving the old (yesterday's) file untouched. Any files the same are
    just hard links, saving buckets of space.

  late: do traditional tape backup to LTO using amanda

Which all makes me feel very warm and cosy. I daren't just rely on the
disk backups, but I don't have to - they give convenience and instant
recovery for most cases, the tapes give me (more) cast iron guarantees.

Simon

BTW if anyone wants my (probably poor attempt at) the ugly script used
to do the above hard link and rsync-ing, just ask.

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