In regard to: Re: [Networker] hypothetical question, Valere Binet said (at...:

We did the first transfer with star and run rsync once a day.
I wrote "hoping" because we didn't test the promotion of a storage node to
server ... yet.
We have NetWorker 7.4.4-1 on all our systems. The server and storage nodes
are running CentOS 5.5.

From this conversation, it seems our strategy could be doomed to fail

because :
1) rsync runs on a live server (we don't shutdown nsr)
2) we don't use the -S option

Well, it wouldn't hurt to use any options that preserve sparse files, but
as I said earlier, these days I'm not even certain any of the indexes will
ever be sparse.  I think the only place there would be any danger is
(unfortunately) the media database, but those files are so small that
I think the danger is minimal.  It might be worth a google to "detect
sparse files" and then follow that procedure, to see if any of your db
files are sparse.

NetWorker doesn't technically need to be down, you just need to have the
databases quiescent during the entire sync.  The problem is that it's not
always easy to predict when NetWorker is going to kick off an automated
index checking process, so it's hard to predict when you're going to have
an appropriate window to perform your sync.

You could do things like checksumming, log scraping, or a second "dry run"
rsync to try detect whether any of the db files changed, but any of those
methods add complexity.  Even pre-running a full consistency check -- if you
force the consistency checks to run on a schedule you can predict, they're
less likely to kick off during your rsync.

Whatever you do, don't make it the only thing you have for disaster
recovery.  That's certain to bite you at a time when you least need
additional trouble.

Tim
--
Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney AT ndsu DOT 
edu
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure                  701-231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, IACC Building                             701-231-8541 (Fax)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164

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