Hi, I just want to share my solution to keep an additional "backup" from the original BackupPC store.
As we all know it's not really a good solution to rsync the BackupPC datastore to somewhere else- due to the hardlinks. Doing manual image copies (ie by swapping the drives of a RAID-1 array) has the big disadvantage as it's a manual step. So I decided to combine a couple of other techniques here: First, my BackupPC is running as a virtual machine on VMware ESX host sharing datastore and resources with the machines to back up. So the obvious disadvantage is the case when the ESX host fails- how should I restore this guy and the BackuPC machine? Well ESX is fairly stable but you never know. My storage uses in total 952GB of backup data. So it's really no good idea to do an rsync here. Swapping drives manually is no good either as the ESX host would complain. So what I did was to set up a physical small sized box (old desktop should work). No RAID involved. I installed there distributed remote block device (drbd- use Google). Same on backuppc machine. So I have a physical separated RAID1 available- just through network. Both drbd devices are using LVM volumes as backing devices so I can enlarge/ shrink at will. The external server addditionaly uses the snaprotate.pl script to create 4 snapshots of the drbd device at weekly rate. The drbd device has BackuPC installed, too. So I can easily tell him to take over and restore. So with my setup I'm nearly prepared for everything at relatively low cost. -backupc itself fails +drbd one will take over after some minor (manual) steps. -backupc wipes out it's storage (script failure or file system issue) +I will roll back on the drbd to one of the previous LVM snapshots (up to four weeks back) -ESX host fails without removing backuppc +Set drbd as primary and restore ESX (or just reinstall, it's faster) -ESX host fails with wiping out the backuppc VM +Set drbd as primary and restore everything from there on So in summary I can easily keep my backuppc storage remotely in sync with drbd and keep snaphshots to roll back weeks. The initial sync and data migration to drbd device took 24hours while- you could reduce backuppc downtime by not doing the dd command in parallel to the initial sync. Only disadvantage is the physical drbd is currently in same building (my home) as the original ESX host. But this is not likely to change due to my low external uplink bandwidth here- someone could use the drbd proxy to use small lines for sync. But this proxy is not available as free software. For me it's fine- if my house burns down I have more serious issues than my BackupPC storage ;-) GReetings Christian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2 _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
