Date: Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:28:27 +0300 From: Evren Yurtesen <yurtesen@ispro.net> To: Vlad GALU <dudu@dudu.ro> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: continuous backup solution for FreeBSD Message-ID: <48EA66DB.8020903@ispro.net> In-Reply-To: <ad79ad6b0810060809s7772db5icc140a19d59b2087@mail.gmail.com> References: <48E9E1BB.6020908@ispro.net> <001AD718-D25B-421B-8B0F-CE71FA5A7CF0@gid.co.uk> <48EA21AE.80607@ispro.net> <ad79ad6b0810060809s7772db5icc140a19d59b2087@mail.gmail.com>
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Vlad GALU wrote: > On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 5:33 PM, Evren Yurtesen <yurtesen@ispro.net> wrote: >> Bob Bishop wrote: >> >>>> Does anybody have free time and skills to give a hand? Please see: >>>> http://forum.r1soft.com/showpost.php?p=3414&postcount=9 >>> Should be possible to do this with a geom(4) class? >>> >> I am not saying it is impossible. They just need somebody to put them to >> right track I guess. I personally cant do that. It would be nice if somebody >> who has knowledge in this area contacts r1soft. At the very least r1soft >> seems to be willing to communicate on this issue. >> >> Continuous backups as well as bare-metal-restore seem to be a key feature >> for many hosters. FreeBSD is loosing users because of this issue. > > gmirror+ggate come to mind as a nifty solution ... That allows mirroring however not a very practical solution. You would need to mirror every drive in another machine and you cant restore the drives into a earlier time. I am talking about a real backup solution where the backup agent collecting the information about written sectors and sending to backup server. You can then restore a file which existed in the box 1 hour ago if you need to. For example think about a situation where a server is processing important data which shouldnt get lost. A software failure wipes out the hard drive. You would loose all the data in the mirror as well. Also the setup of such mirroring system would be rather complicated. In addition to that, the mirroring does not support for example restore of mysql databases in table level. Think about a customer who wiped out his database accidentally. All the data would be gone in the mirror as well. With near continuous backup you can restore the data to just moments before the deletion process. Traditional backup systems at best daily backups, even if you could restore the data, the data could be up to 1 day old. More on that subject, r1soft supports multiple hosting control panel softwares. For example H-Sphere ( http://www.parallels.com/hsphere/ ) etc. through plugins which allow hosting customers to restore their own data easily. Something impossible with gmirror+ggate combination (since it does not actually backup the data and only mirror it) and not even practical if it was possible, if you have thousands of users. Actually, I am not saying that anybody should be doing about this and neither am I an r1soft advocate. I am just pointing out that there is a company out there which can provide a valuable software tool and they need somebody to put them into right direction only. If you know some FreeBSD developers who know the disk subsystem and can help R1Soft then you can perhaps forward this information to them. This not a feature or help request and I just am mentioning this. However you can imagine that a company which is giving online services on a serious scale probably would be interested in a CDP solution. It is currently impossible with FreeBSD. This makes using FreeBSD servers on critical applications a little bit insecure data protectionwise thus often people prefer Linux which is supported by such continuous data protection type backup solutions. (not that I am advocating FreeBSD or Linux here but this is the situation). Thanks, Evrne
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