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Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 23:47:53 +0930 (CST)
From: Peter Childs <pjchilds@imforei.apana.org.au>
Message-Id: <199610131417.XAA24258@al.imforei.apana.org.au>
To: erich@ip.org (Eric L. Hinson), freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Hard disk replication/mirroring under FreeBSD?
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In article <199610122204.SAA16411@krypton.ip.org> you wrote:
: Hi there,

 Gday!

: What are the suggested methods of making complete mirrors of hard drives 
: across a network running FreeBSD?

: The goal is to have a complete working mirror of the unix boxes that run 
: the ISP so that if one drive dies, there is a ready-made replacement 
: drive built and up to date as of the last mirror (run nightly from cron).

: I am considering linking the two main machines to the backup machine with 
: separate ethernet links to the backup machine to since our ethernet is 
: pretty saturated.  This would also increase the performance of the backup.

 I used rsync here (over ssh but it works over rsh fine) to sync backups
 weekly.  I've got three machines in town (web/mail server, news server,
 and terminal server) and I can back up the unique files (ie. / and
 /usr/local type) for all three systems on one 230mb MO.

 I just run rsync from a script... and it updates the backup... over my
 28.8k modem line it only takes about 10-20 mins...

 Peace of mind (off site backup)

 I just use a little script like this (for example)

mount /dev/od0a /od
cd /od
rsync -rptDogHxv --delete -e ssh chuckie:// /od/chuckie 2>&1 | 
  mail -s "chuckie remote backup pt1" sa-tech@sa
rsync -rptDogHxv --delete --exclude 'history*' -e ssh chuckie://usr/local/
  /od/chuckie_local 2>&1 | mail -s "chuckie remote backup pt2" sa-tech@sa
umount /dev/od0a 

 to do our news server backup (i don't worry about the history file :)

: Also other than taking the system to single user mode, can backups be 
: done in such a way that they backup a working set of files as of a 
: specific time so that changes made half way through the backup wouldn't
: effect the usability of the backup?

 Umm.. next question :)

 Peter

--
 Peter Childs  ---  http://www.imforei.apana.org.au/~pjchilds
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