From owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Nov 26 13:02:03 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.org Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6E39116A41F; Sat, 26 Nov 2005 13:02:03 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from anderson@centtech.com) Received: from mh1.centtech.com (moat3.centtech.com [207.200.51.50]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 08FFF43D4C; Sat, 26 Nov 2005 13:02:02 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from anderson@centtech.com) Received: from [192.168.42.25] ([192.168.42.25]) by mh1.centtech.com (8.13.1/8.13.1) with ESMTP id jAQD218i088554; Sat, 26 Nov 2005 07:02:01 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from anderson@centtech.com) Message-ID: <43885CB7.1070700@centtech.com> Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 07:01:43 -0600 From: Eric Anderson User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20051021 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Robert Watson References: <57416b300511162006m4cfe53f8n6dc2bccb877a5567@mail.gmail.com> <437C776B.6000705@centtech.com> <20051126123044.B81764@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <20051126123044.B81764@fledge.watson.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: ClamAV 0.82/1195/Fri Nov 25 03:29:55 2005 on mh1.centtech.com X-Virus-Status: Clean Cc: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Backup solutions X-BeenThere: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Internet Services Providers List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 13:02:03 -0000 Robert Watson wrote: > On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, Eric Anderson wrote: > >>> FWIW, i have read that by far the best is dump, because of the way it >>> deals with the raw data. No need to worry bout files with holes in >>> them (with other backup tools, this could mean you may not be able to >>> fit the file system back on after backup, if there are core files >>> etc) I believe i read this in the O'Rielly text Unix Power Tools, but >>> could be wrong. They also referenced an extensive test that was done >>> by someone, and gave the link. I will post it if i find it. >> >> >> rsync handles sparse files just fine. > > > The problem I've had with rsync is that it wants to build a list of all > files to be backed up. On my cyrus server, I have file systems with >6m > files. This causes rsync to core dump when it discovers it can't > allocate memory to hold the entire list at once. > > Recently I've taken to backing up with dump -L, as the snapshot facility > means recovery after a failure is a lot easier -- you no longer have to > worry about the fact that the first file in a directory might be backed > up at 10:00am, and the second at 2:00pm, causing applications to get > very upset. Unfortunately, I don't have that option, since the servers I am backing up are linux machines with a custom filesystem that does not support snapshots. rsync is easy on the network, but hard on the disks. Eric -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Anderson Sr. Systems Administrator Centaur Technology Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't. ------------------------------------------------------------------------