I have never looked into fsfreeze thanks for that little nugget.

Two of the main file servers are windows based so I think that I will 
use the bacula client vss support to freeze the data for those two severs.

David


On 11/14/2012 10:11 AM, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, David Palmer <dwpalmer AT cazenovia DOT edu> said:
>> 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?
> I back up a volume from an Equalogic SAN like this.  You do have to be
> careful; you should limit visibility of the base volume to the active
> server and the snapshot to the backup server, or "odd" things can
> happen (depending on OS, filesystem, etc.).
>
> You also need a way to create a consistent filesystem snapshot.  For
> example, my volume is used by a Linux server and contains an LVM volume.
> My snapshot script connects to the server and creates an LVM snapshot
> first, connects to the SAN to create a SAN snapshot, and then removes
> the LVM snapshot on the server.  The SAN snapshot volume is then mounted
> on the backup server.
>
> Without LVM, Linux also has the "fsfreeze" command to sync a filesystem
> (flush all pending writes and hold new writes).  You could freeze the
> FS, create the SAN snapshot, and unfreeze.
>


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