Hello.
Francesco wrote:
In your guide you said:
"If any applications are running during the backup and they have open files, Bacula will not be able to backup those files, so be sure you close your applications (or tell your users to close their applications) before the backup."
Can i have more specs about this ? Which files and/or wich applications can't permit the file copy ??
There's no short answer to your question.
Three things can happen:
- A file is opened by an application "exclusively": The file can not be read by bacula-fd and an error message is created. You can use these to track things you want to exclude from your backup: Under Windows, this will be things like swap file, and all other sorts of system stuff. I also can't access many files belonging to a virus scanner. You have to determine if these files should be excluded (like a swap file or virus scanner work files) or you normally want to save them.
- A file is opened by an application, but not in a coherent state, but bacula can read it: These cases are the most difficult ones, IMO, because you can save them, everything seems fine, but your backup is worthless. You have no easy way of finding these cases. This is what usually happens when you save a file on a unix system which is just being written to, like a MySQL database. In many cases there are other ways to save the data, but you need to set them up.
- Many applications don't touch the files they work on, but rather use in-memory copies or temporary files during work. Usually, only when saving the work the files are actually written to or, even better, the work file and the regular file are swapped. This can be more or less atomic, so you will not have problems saving files from such applications (think vi or emacs, for example).
if a notepad (.txt) file is open bacula do the backup?
To my knowledge - yes.
if an access file (.mdb) if open by MSAccess or by the IIS is the same thing? bacula will backup this file if is open by a server web?
Don't know. But to save these files the database usually has a tool to create a copy or a dump of a running database.
bacula will exclude EVERY open file or there is any exception ???
You can see the excluded files in baculas logs. Problems arise where you don't get any information on possible problems (case 2 above).
Thank you for your anwers guys!
By the way: To prevent these problems, you need some sort of open file management. Under linux and other unixes, you usually have the possibility to use snapshots, usually this can be included into baculas saving process using scripts.
Under windows, there is what MS calls Volume Shadow Copies, but it's not easy to linkt to bacula.
Third party software like St.Bernards OFM can solve some of the issues.
In general, when you want to save data from applications that are always running and keep their files (and other state information) not coherently on disk, you need to use the tools and procedures that software offers. databases and Mail servers are good examples...
Arno
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-- IT-Service Lehmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] Arno Lehmann http://www.its-lehmann.de
------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
