[BBLISA] System Backup thoughts and questions...

[David Allan]

I think there are probably as many answers to this question as there are 
members of this list, but I have found tar to be a simple and effective 
solution for this sort of problem, although I can't say I've tried it on 
anything approaching that number of files:

tar cf - /source/directory | ( cd /backup/directory ; tar xvf - )

Looking forward to the discussion thread,
Dave


On Thu, 8 Jan 2009, Richard 'Doc' Kinne wrote:

> Hi Folks:
>
> I'm looking at backups - simple backups right now.
>
> We have a strategy where an old computer is mounted with a large external, 
> removable hard drive. Directories - large directories - that we have on our 
> other production servers are mounted on this small computer via NFS. A cron 
> job then does a simple "cp" from the NFS mounted production drive partitions 
> to to the large, external, removable hard drive.
>
> I thought it was an elegant solution, myself, except for one small, niggling 
> detail.
>
> It doesn't work.
>
> The process doesn't copy all the files. Oh, we're not having a problem with 
> file locks, no. When you do a "du -sh <directory>" comparison between the 
> /scsi/web directory on the backup drive and the production /scsi/web 
> directory the differences measure in the GB. For example my production /scsi 
> partition has 62GB on it. The most recently done backup has 42GB on it!
>
> What our research found is that the cp command apparently has a limit of 
> copying 250,000 inodes. I have image directories on the webserver that have 
> 114,000 files so this is the limit I think I'm running into.
>
> While I'm looking at solutions like Bacula and Amanda, etc., I'm wondering if 
> RSYNCing the files may work.  Or will I run into the same limitation?
>
> Any thoughts?
> ---
> Richard 'Doc' Kinne, [KQR]
> American Association of Variable Star Observers
> <rkinne @ aavso.org>
>
>
>