[Pc_Support] Re: Backup methodology -- centralize for lower TCO

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Mon, 2006-06-26 at 22:42 -0400, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Huh?
> First off, you're not using rsync?
> Secondly, there are various "snapshot" options -- not only at the volume
> manager level, but also using hard links.
> And there are many other options too.

A real simple "near-line backup server" approach is to (during the
backup window):  
  1.  Do a "LVM snapshot" on the backup server  
  2.  Then have all clients rsync on the backup server  

Now snapshots for LVM currently only work kernel 2.4 (LVM2/DM2 snapshot
support is not "production quality" yet on kernel 2.6), so I still
advocate using RHEL/CentOS 3 (and not moving to kernel RHEL/CentOS 4
yet).

I keep 5 snapshots for every day of the past week (not including Friday)
and then another 3 snapshots for the last 3 Fridays -- 8 total.  If data
retention is really big, I'll add 2 more snapshots for the last 4th
Fridays (2 months) -- 10 total.

In addition to being able to put any "snapshot" to tape, I read-only
share out LVM snapshots (they are read-only on LVM anyway) via NFS/Samba
so users can restore their own files without bothering me.

[ I really need to document this in my ELResource pages -- just haven't
had time as of late. ]


-- 
Bryan J. Smith           Professional, technical annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org     http://thebs413.blogspot.com
----------------------------------------------------------
The existence of Linux has far more to do with the breakup
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