[Techtalk] backup suggestions needed

[Conor Daly]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 10:44:11PM -0500 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Michelle Murrain thought:
> At 9:34 PM +0000 11/21/02, Jen B wrote:
> >I have one DLT drive, and 2 db servers that require backup.
> >There is not enough diskspace on either to make a local copy of all the
> >files that require backup (which i would then backup with a single 'dump'
> >if life were easy)
> >
> >Can anyone suggest the  best way to do this? I've been searching for
> >the better part of today for a way to rsync to a tape drive-but no luck.
> >I would very,very much like to avoid using .rhosts,nfs, or any remote
> >mounting even on a private net-but so far that seems like the way to go.
> 
> I just set up, thanks to Dancer, a 3 server backup system - I have a 
> SCSI DAT attached to one machine, and use tar and dd to back up 
> others.
> 
> The important part of the script to copy the remote directories looks like:
> 
> ssh root at host "tar cplf - /etc /home /usr/local" | dd of=/dev/tape
> 
> Obviously you need to set up the host as authorized.
> 
> I'll be quite happy to send you the entire script, if you want. It's 
> quite good, and works quite well (thanks Dancer!)
> -- 
> .Michelle

I didn't speak up sooner 'cos I don't think it does client/server stuff
but I've been using mondoarchive (http://www.mondorescue.org) as my backup
system.  I'm well pleased with it, I've even gone so far as to nuke a
perfectly good system so as to test its restore capabilities.  Then I did
it again, this time _without_ the mirror disk on standby!

It _is_ capable of doing multi-box backup but not as a single process.
Instead, you nfs mount the server's fs on the client, run mondoarchive on
the client and then run mondoarchive on the server to get everything onto
tape.

Mondo also archives to CDR(W) for those of us not graced/burdened[0] with
tapes.  It produces bootable archives with "nuke" and "interactive" modes,
has cloning capabilities for both identical and differing machines.

It's a proper *NIX tool:- uses existing dedicated tools for the various
tasks and, best of all, is all GPL.

Conor


[0] have you ever tried to get a system back _off_ a tape?
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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