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2000-06-18-20:02:37 Ian Willis:
> I have been thinking along these lines for a while. My wish list
> is a system to avoid backups (not archives) via the following.
> Rsyncing changed files from the server to a remote backup system.
> When a file is modified the difference is also stored with a
> timestamp so that rollbacks are possible. A window could be
> defined that enables the deletion of all files with a timestamp
> greater than a certain age. lockfiles etc could be ignored. Sure
> it would use loads of disk space but the ratio of the price of
> tapes:disk is changing and it would stop those situation where
> user X deletes the file that they've been working on all day and
> can it be restored.
I've been doing something a lot like that, with great satisfaction.
Our main fileserver has five 50GB 'cudas on it. So I partitioned
each of 'em into 16GB/34GB slices. I took the five 16GB slices, and
used them to make a 50GB RAID-5 partition with one hot spare. I took
the five 34GB slices and made a RAID-5 with no hot spares. The
former is our main file store, the latter is /backup.
A periodic cron job runs; I've got it going every 6 hours. It rsyncs
everything except /backup to various subdirectories of
/backup/current, using --backup-dir to save copies of the previous
state of the file into a timestamp-named dir heirarchy. Then that
timestamp dir is tarred up and bzip2ed. When the filesystem starts
to get too full, the oldest of these change files are purged to free
up space. At the moment this is giving us almost exactly 2 months
coverage.
I'll be glad to make the script available, but since it hasn't
changed since the last time I emailed it to this list, I'll refrain
from shoving it into all your faces again.
- -Bennett
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