Re: [Bacula-users] Input on backing up a SAN

On 11/14/12 09:36, David Palmer wrote:
> I am looking at ways to speed up our backups as our data continues to 
> grow. We currently have an equallogic group that stores much of our 
> information. One idea that we had for speeding up backups is to have a 
> file server that is separate from our production file servers and 
> mounting the data volumes as read only for backups. I am not planing to 
> use this for anything but file servers (ie sql / mail).
> 
> My question is has any one done this or something similar? Are there any 
> disadvantages that by configuring it this way for our file servers?

You say "mounting the data volumes as read only for backups".  Do you
mean mount the production servers' data volumes via NFS onto a separate
server where you will back them up?  This is likely to be slower than
just running a bacula client on the production servers themselves, and
is not a good idea.

You also mentioned "SQL/mail".  You should not be backing up SQL DBs at
the file level.  Doing so does not guarantee a consistent backup of the
DB because there is time skew between the beginning and end of the DB
backup (and can be time skew even within individual tables).  If all
you're doing is a file-level backup of the DB data directories, you
almost certainly only *think* you have backups of your DB.

If it's a small installation, the approach you should be looking at is
probably taking a consistent dump of the DB using a SQL dump utility of
some kind, then backing up the dumps.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
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co.ordinate DOT org
  Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, SQL wrangler, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.

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