On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 05:51:29PM +0200, Boniforti Flavio wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > there is a regular discussion on how to backup/move/copy the 
> > backuppc pool. Did anyone try to backup the pool with bacula?
> 
> Hello there...
> 
> I don't know about bacula, but would like myself also to get a backup of
> the BackupPC server: anybody got some suggestions and practical
> examples?


This is how we handle backups of the backuppc pool:
* the pool itself is on a LUKS-encrypted XFS filesystem, on a LVM volume, on a
  software RAID1 of 2 1TB disks.
* twice a week following procedure in run:
  * Freeze the XFS filesystem, sync, lvm-snapshot the encrypted volume
  * Unfreeze 
  * send the snapshot over ssh to an offsite server (which thus only ever sees
    the encrypted data)
  * remove the snapshot
* The offsite server has 2 smaller disks (not in RAID), and snapshots are sent
  in turn to one and to the other. This means we still have a complete pool if
  something would goes wrong during the transfer (which takes +- a day)
* The consistency of the offsite backups can be verified by exporting them
  over NBD (network block device), and mounting them on the
  normal backup server (which has the encryption keys)
    
We use a blockdevice-based solution instead of a filesystem-based one, because
the many small files (16 million inodes and growing) makes those very disk-
and cpu intensive. (simply doing a "find | wc -l" in the root takes hours).
Furthermore it makes encryption easier.
We are also working on a rsync-like system for block devices (yet that make
still take some time...), which would bring the time for synchronising the
backup server with the offsite one down to 1-2 hours.

Greetz,

-- 
Pieter

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