[WBEL-users] Backups?

[James Knowles]

Your answer: "Depends," but if you rotate several hard drives it can 
work great for a few hundred gigs of data.

I think one of the biggest things is that it's convenient enough that 
the backups get done.

We use rsync over ssh to backup a half-dozen machines to a single large 
hard drive. We wrote a little Perl program that translates command-line 
parameters into options, mounts the backup drive, and does preliminary 
checks... so it's pretty flexible and a no-brainer.

We use hard drives mounted in a removable chasis, but being non-hotswap 
ATAs we have to power down the machine doing backups to change drives. 
For us this is not a problem.

The nice thing has been random access to huge amounts of data for those 
rare but traumatic "oops" moments. :-)

An example of the things that the backup program needs to track can be 
seen in test mode:

[root@aspra root]# ./backup.remote --dev=/dev/hdd1 --mountpoint=/u1 
--detail=2 --test sherizod
Attempting to back up sherizod.
Backup device is /dev/hdd1
Backup root directory is /u1
Compression is OFF
Detail level is extensive
Mounting is ON
sherizod is REMOTE
Good. /dev/hdd1 appears to already be mounted on /u1.
Starting backup.
rsync -essh -aSv --stats --delete --progress  --exclude=/dev 
--exclude=/proc --exclude=/sys --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/mnt 
--exclude=/tmp  sherizod:/ /u1/rsync/sherizod
[root@aspra root]#