From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Nov 20 05:59:51 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D824316A4CE for ; Thu, 20 Nov 2003 05:59:51 -0800 (PST) Received: from sccrmhc13.comcast.net (sccrmhc13.comcast.net [204.127.202.64]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DD9A743F3F for ; Thu, 20 Nov 2003 05:59:48 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org) Received: from be-well.no-ip.com ([66.30.200.37]) by comcast.net (sccrmhc13) with ESMTP id <2003112013594801600res95e>; Thu, 20 Nov 2003 13:59:48 +0000 Received: by be-well.no-ip.com (Postfix, from userid 1147) id 1A8203A; Thu, 20 Nov 2003 08:59:48 -0500 (EST) Sender: lowell@be-well.ilk.org To: Keith Spencer References: <20031120022835.43690.qmail@web12008.mail.yahoo.com> From: Lowell Gilbert Date: 20 Nov 2003 08:59:47 -0500 In-Reply-To: <20031120022835.43690.qmail@web12008.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <44n0arp2cs.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> Lines: 36 User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Can I bakup like this...?? <--user mode Reuben? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 13:59:52 -0000 Keith Spencer 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.