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From: anubis <anubis357@optusnet.com.au>
To: "Richard Beyer" <richard@planet-richard.com>,
	"'FreeBSD Questions List'" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 12:49:14 +1000
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Subject: Re: backup
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On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 9:32 am, Richard Beyer wrote:
> We're currently doing a back up of a FreeBSD 4.9 (2) server by
> plugging a USB external drive in and then doing
>
>
>
> cp /dev/ad0 /dev/da0
>
>
>
> This takes about 30 hours, (USB 1).
>
>
>
> Is this the best way to do it, or can someone suggest a better way.
>  We'd rather not have the server offline while we do it.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard


Why not use removeable drive trays with straight pata drives?  You 
could then use rsync to only update the changes since the last 
backup.  This would solve the time problem.  

We use rsync to hourly backup about 100GB of data used by about 50 
people.  It only takes about 10-20 minutes to update all the changes.  
Of course time depends on the amount of data changed.  For the os it 
shouldnt be much at all.


With removeable drives you just need to unmount the drive then 
atacontrol detatch and you can pull it out while the machine is 
going.