On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 09:27:27AM +0200, Christer Bern�rus wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> As some of you probably know, we are leaving NFS for DFS (not AFS, sorry). One
>requirement that
> always
> pops up from the old NFSers are:
> "We need file level backup with ACLs.!!"
> The question is, do they really?
> If you use backup clones that are mounted and available for your users, how often do
>you have to
> turn to your tapes in order to restore mistakenly erased files ?
> In our experience from about 10 years of somewhat limited AFS usage, this has
>happened less than
> 10 times altogether.
> What are your experiences in this field ?
I would say that you should definately go for file level backup with ACL's.
The reason for this is that you never know what may happen to a large
volume or file server with LOTS of volumes. We have learned this from
a couple of recent experiences where our AFS file server process crashed.
This caused the salvager to run when it was restarted and for some unknown,
as yet to us or Transarc, reason the salvager decided that there
was no actual data associated with certain volumes and subsequently deleted
thousands (yes thousands) of volumes. Restores from this took over 17+ and
12+ hours each time it happened (once we figured out which ones were
deleted and needed restoring). I could not imagine what kind of cleanup
would be needed if ACL's were not restored with these volumes.
Never underestimate the need for a full, and absolutely complete, backup.
In case anyone wants to know this happened on a HPUX 11.0 machine running
the latest release of AFS 3.6.
--
James J. Barlow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Senior System Engineer
National Center for Supercomputing Applications Voice : (217)244-6403
605 East Springfield Avenue Champaign, IL 61820 Cell : (217)840-0601
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/jbarlow Fax : (217)244-1987
