Jim,
Haven't tried VxFS snapshots (HP-UX 11.x) on catalog backups but we do use them
extensively to backup our
ClearCase (Configuration Management tool from Rational) databases. They work
wonderfully, allowing us to perform
nightly backups of nearly 700GB of data with almost no impact to our user
community. There are a couple of caveats:
- as you indicated, the longer the snapshot is in existence, the larger it will
grow as all changes to the original file
system are also written to the snapshot file system.
- if the snapshot grows beyond it's allocated size (i.e. fills up), it will
eventually disable itself and unmount causing
backups to fail. Proactively gauging this growth is practically impossible,
there's no way to track the amount of space
used by the snapshot until it's too late. It's a trial and error thing...
Beyond these concerns, the snapshot idea should work well. I'd be very
interested to know your results.
--
Regards,
Ric Sokolowski (Ric.Sokolowski AT motorola DOT com)
Staff Systems Engineer
Phone: (954) 723-6332 Pager: 8776050503 AT skytel DOT com
Motorola, Inc. / CGISS / Enterprise Computing
8000 West Sunrise Blvd, MS 22-2F, Plantation, FL 33322
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