[ale] Today's lesson: rdiff-backup restores

[DJ-Pfulio]

Don't forget about ZFS zsend to replicate snapshots.

If you really want to be cheap and have a GUI, I setup Back-In-Time on Mom's
system - then scheduled hourly "snapshots" - which are really just rsync +
hardlinks in the old directory area.  The default B-I-T schedule keeps hourly
"snapshots" for 2 days, then slowly removes those, daily, weekly, monthly,
annual.  The target directory structures are YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS/ based and full of
hardlinks for all the identical files.  Removing any YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS/ is safe,
since all the others have their hardlinks to the real data.  OTOH, if there is
data corruption on the disk, then all those hardlinks are useless.

Gave a presentation about this 3-4 yrs ago at ALE-NW, if anyone is interested,
let me know and I'll dig it up.  In my mind, B-i-T is best for end-user backups,
not system backups (there are issues running it as root - nothing hard for
Jim-like people, but ... )


On 02/23/2016 10:37 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> Yep – all sorts of ways to do things.
> 
>  
> 
> One could sync a  live storage array to another storage array without doing
> standard backups (e.g. EMC’s SRDF or Hitachi’s Shadow Image).  
> 
>  
> 
> One could create another server that has same setup as original and simply copy
> differences (e.g. rsync) periodically. 
> 
>  
> 
> I worked at one place where we’d setup the same database on separate servers but
> ran the remote in “standby” mode.   On the primary we had full archive logging
> running and shipped all logs to the remote as they were written.   We’d apply
> the logs to that standby database on a 6 hour delay.   (This gave us time to
> stop the logs from being applied if we determined the Production server had
> something bad in the logs such as an accidental full table delete.)   In the
> event of a failure of Production we could accelerate application of the logs on
> the standby database so we didn’t have to wait 6 hours to get up and running.
> 
>  
> 
> Regardless of how you do it, generally speaking also having offsite media like
> tapes is a good thing for portability and archiving of older images.
> 
>