Hi, I recently ran into a neat filesystem limitation with BackupPC that doesn't appear to be anywhere in the documentation.
On certain filesystems, under certain conditions, BackupPC can exhaust that filesystem's ability to create files and directories. For example, on ext3, there is a hard limit on the number of inodes available for a given partition; the limit is established when the partition is formatted, and is usually automatically calculated as (volume size in bytes) / 2^13. If BackuPC's pool is stored on an ext3 filesystem, and it's storing a very large number of small files, it may exhaust all of the available inodes for that filesystem. The system administrator will then find that they can't create new files or directories, but they can write to existing files and directories, which is kinda cute if you haven't seen it before. We ran into this after starting hourly backups of a Dovecot mail server. To check your available inodes: # df -i Increasing available inodes can only be done by re-formatting the volume that BackupPC uses for its pool. In the case of ext3, this looks like: # mkfs.ext3 -N <inodes> <device> Also, I have a how-to available for doing very secure backups between servers. We use BackupPC to regularly copy everything on our web and mail servers, and didn't want to create any additional security risks in the process; we have BackupPC doing password-less logins and sudo'ing its rsync task without having any additional access to the server. Is there any interest in this? - R. -- [__ Robert Sheldon [__ Founder, No Problem [__ Information technology support and services [__ (530) 575-0278 [__ "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." -- Mahatma Gandhi ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn how Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) One Node allows customers to consolidate database storage, standardize their database environment, and, should the need arise, upgrade to a full multi-node Oracle RAC database without downtime or disruption http://p.sf.net/sfu/oracle-sfdevnl _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
