Date: 20 Nov 2003 08:59:47 -0500 From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org> To: Keith Spencer <bsd2000au@yahoo.com.au> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Can I bakup like this...?? <--user mode Reuben? Message-ID: <44n0arp2cs.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> In-Reply-To: <20031120022835.43690.qmail@web12008.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20031120022835.43690.qmail@web12008.mail.yahoo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Keith Spencer <bsd2000au@yahoo.com.au> writes: > I just spent many hours finding out my bakup strategy > was useless (didn't know what I was doing I guess) You don't really have a backup strategy unless you have tested it. I just finished building myself a new backup system, and I had to run it through a few iterations before I was happy with everything it did (including testing boundary cases like running out of space and so on). > Now I need to do it properly. Sure, but first you need to understand (at least loosely) what your idea of "properly" is for this particular machine. This is something that you need to determine before you start working out the technical approach. You implied in an earlier message that your main priority is minimum downtime. If so, you were probably on the right track with your strategy of a second disk in the box, kept reasonably up-to-date automatically, and ready to be swapped in as the primary disk. If this disk is a server, with a lot of user data, then that probably isn't enough, and you need periodic backups that don't get overwritten. If you really need minimum downtime, then dropping to single-user mode for backups won't be practical. You'll need to keep the second disk synched with the first by some method that will work fairly dependably in multi-user mode. Either dump/restore or tar will do fairly well; there will be some race conditions where some files could end up improperly synched, but those conditions are unlikely and easy to recover from (if you have another, user-data focused, backup strategy as well). Good luck.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?44n0arp2cs.fsf>