[lug] Tape backup app

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 08:43:28AM -0700, Neil Doane wrote:
>Hmm...news to me.  So how do other backup solutions address this problem? 

For databases you can do a dump or other sort of 'online backup' archive
to get a good copy of the data written out to the file-system.

Another interesting idea is to use LVM.  With LVM you can set up a
snapshot partition, in which old copies of updated blocks get stored.
So, you shut down your important services, enable the snapshot, then
bring the services back up.  At that point you can do a backup of the
snapshot file-system, which is the state the file-system was in when the
services were shut down, but the services are back up and running.

It's got the advantages of making sure the system is quiet while the
backup is running, but only requiring a minute of down-time instead of
having the services down for the full duration of the backup.

I have a script I run (included on KRUD) which will save off copies of
PostgreSQL, MySQL, and RPM databases and keep a few older copies of the
data around.  That works nicely for the databases.  On my laptop, the
databases are really the only thing I worry that much about.

Sean
-- 
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Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
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