Hello Georg,
On Wednesday 05 December 2007 13:41, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> allow me to ask one (potentially stupid) question about backing up to
> DVD, which I feel the urge to ask to avoid relying on a false
> understanding of how things work.
>
> I have a setup where a central server is backing up several machines
> regularly to a large hard disk partition. This server runs the director
> and the main storage daemon and thus also keeps all the records in a
> MySQL database.
>
> In addition, I do base level backups of some of my machines to DVD,
> ending up with a stack of DVDs containing all my data from those
> machines.
>
> Normally, if something were to happen to the disk storage, but the
> database were still intact, I understand that I would simply restore via
> the director normally and it would know which DVDs it needs.
>
> But in case that server got lost, stolen, burnt to the ground or became
> victim of whatever else one might imagine, I'd be left with the DVDs
> alone.
>
> If I understand the documentation correctly, I could then set up another
> bacula director, and use "bscan" to scan the DVDs to fill up the
> database with the information about the files contained on those DVDs to
> use that as the basis of my restore.
>
> For obvious reasons I don't really feel like going through all of this
> in a test scenario just to confim my understanding -- so if you could
> let me know whether my understanding is correct, or where I went astray,
> that would be greatly appreciated.
Here are a couple of tips:
1. You should really attempt to avoid using DVD backup if you can. DLT or
better autochangers are now available on ebay for about €300, and if you just
want a single tape drive they are even cheaper. DLT, or LTO drives are
*much* more reliable than DVD.
2. You should at all cost attempt to avoid doing a bscan to recreate your
catalog. The best alternative is to write your catalog out using the
standard script each night in a Backup-catalog job or something like that. I
use two techniques to ensure that the current catalog can then be restored
quickly. The first is to write out the .bsr file to a different machine via
an NFS mount.
Write Bootstrap = "/home/backup/roxie/catalog.bsr"
in your catalog backup.
3. I've enhanced my make_catalog_backup script to include the following:
cd /home/kern/bacula/bin
find `pwd` -maxdepth 1 -type f >file-list
so that file_list contains a list of all the files that make up Bacula (I do
an install into a single file (/home/kern/bacula/bin). Then I add the
file-list to the catalog backup as in:
# Backup the copy of the catalog
FileSet {
Name = "CatalogFile"
Include {
Options {
signature=MD5
}
File = /home/kern/bacula/bin/working/bacula.sql
File = "</home/kern/bacula/bin/file-list"
}
}
This gives me a single backup each night that has both the catalog AND all my
Bacula binaries, scripts, conf files, ....
4. Finally I email the resulting .bsr file to myself, so that I not only have
the bsr file on file, but in an email message.
It is probably not fool proof but it does give me a lot more options for
getting my catalog back without resorting to bscan.
Concerning your question about how to push the last files out on the DVD: I
don't use DVD so will leave it to others to answer, but if you want to be
sure everything is on the DVD, setup the bacula-dir.conf file so that every
job is immediately written to the DVD at the end of the Job -- much safer,
and you will immediately find any errors.
Best regards,
Kern
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