Hi,
I recently ran into a neat filesystem limitation with BackupPC that
doesn't appear to be anywhere in the documentation.
On certain filesystems, under certain conditions, BackupPC can exhaust
that filesystem's ability to create files and directories. For example,
on ext3, there is a hard limit on the number of inodes available for a
given partition; the limit is established when the partition is
formatted, and is usually automatically calculated as (volume size in
bytes) / 2^13. If BackuPC's pool is stored on an ext3 filesystem, and
it's storing a very large number of small files, it may exhaust all of
the available inodes for that filesystem. The system administrator will
then find that they can't create new files or directories, but they can
write to existing files and directories, which is kinda cute if you
haven't seen it before.
We ran into this after starting hourly backups of a Dovecot mail
server.
To check your available inodes:
# df -i
Increasing available inodes can only be done by re-formatting the
volume that BackupPC uses for its pool. In the case of ext3, this looks
like:
# mkfs.ext3 -N <inodes> <device>
Also, I have a how-to available for doing very secure backups between
servers. We use BackupPC to regularly copy everything on our web and
mail servers, and didn't want to create any additional security risks
in the process; we have BackupPC doing password-less logins and
sudo'ing its rsync task without having any additional access to the
server. Is there any interest in this?
- R.
--
[__ Robert Sheldon
[__ Founder, No Problem
[__ Information technology support and services
[__ (530) 575-0278
[__ "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." -- Mahatma
Gandhi
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