On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 1:34 PM, Steve Holdoway <st...@greengecko.co.nz> wrote: > I wouldn't do that with the backups personally. If you're after backing > up important production databases, then I'd look at replicating them > ( to another machine preferably ) as a frist line of defence.
Replication gives you defence from hardware failure, the same way that RAID does. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with being a "backup" in the data sense. Except ... > whilst over there, cold backups have no effect on live systems > performance... The only effect that they have is to push back on your replication system :-) As long as the primary doesn't get excess load while waiting for the replicant to come back up, you're in business. > and no matter how cumbersome they are, I reckon they > should always be a part of your backup strategy (: Sure, but effectively that's what a snapshot is; if a full cold backup takes say 1 hour, with LVM snapshotting you can reduce that to a couple of seconds. Surely that's worth investigating? If you can grab a snapshot that quickly (it'll still take an hour to actually back up from there, but the DB doesn't have to know), and your production system can handle being read-only for a second or so, you can dispense with the need for a replicant in the first place. -jim
