My setup is somewhat simpler.  My BackupPC datastore is stored on a 
700GB LVM logical volume on a 1TB disk, and I have 3 external 1TB eSATA 
disks.  Each week I make a snapshot of the BackupPC logical volume and 
"dd" the snapshot volume to one of the external disks (takes about 2 
hours) and then "cmp" the snapshot volume and the raw partition on the 
external disk.  The newest backup disk lives at home, I take the next 
oldest in to work and keep it in my desk, and bring the oldest disk home.

Andrew

On 11/07/11 19:43, Eduardo Díaz Rodríguez wrote:
> I have a similar situation but apply diferent way.
>
> One cluster two machines. one service (samba) the RAID1 software is
> used by drbd.
>
> Every cluster has one hard disk for backups (sda for data(drbd) and SO,
> and sdb backup-pc, and dump of the OS).
>
> the backup normaly is in local now I use rsyncd every server make a
> copy of the data using the IP of the cluster. rsync to IP of the
> cluster, and get de data.
>
> two same copys... :-)..
>
> On Sun, 10 Jul 2011 08:22:25 +0200, Christian Völker wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I just want to share my solution to keep an additional "backup" from
>> the
>> original BackupPC store.
>>
>> As we all know it's not really a good solution to rsync the BackupPC
>> datastore to somewhere else- due to the hardlinks. Doing manual image
>> copies (ie by swapping the drives of a RAID-1 array) has the big
>> disadvantage as it's a manual step.
>>
>> So I decided to combine a couple of other techniques here:
>> First, my BackupPC is running as a virtual machine on VMware ESX host
>> sharing datastore and resources with the machines to back up. So the
>> obvious disadvantage is the case when the ESX host fails- how should
>> I
>> restore this guy and the BackuPC machine? Well ESX is fairly stable
>> but
>> you never know.
>> My storage uses in total 952GB of backup data. So it's really no good
>> idea to do an rsync here. Swapping drives manually is no good either
>> as
>> the ESX host would complain.
>>
>> So what I did was to set up a physical small sized box (old desktop
>> should work). No RAID involved. I installed there distributed remote
>> block device (drbd- use Google). Same on backuppc machine. So I have
>> a
>> physical separated RAID1 available- just through network. Both drbd
>> devices are using LVM volumes as backing devices so I can enlarge/
>> shrink at will. The external server addditionaly uses the
>> snaprotate.pl
>> script to create 4 snapshots of the drbd device at weekly rate.
>> The drbd device has BackuPC installed, too. So I can easily tell him
>> to
>> take over and restore.
>>
>> So with my setup I'm nearly prepared for everything at relatively low
>> cost.
>> -backupc itself fails
>> +drbd one will take over after some minor (manual) steps.
>> -backupc wipes out it's storage (script failure or file system issue)
>> +I will roll back on the drbd to one of the previous LVM snapshots
>> (up
>> to four weeks back)
>> -ESX host fails without removing backuppc
>> +Set drbd as primary and restore ESX (or just reinstall, it's faster)
>> -ESX host fails with wiping out the backuppc VM
>> +Set drbd as primary and restore everything from there on
>>
>> So in summary I can easily keep my backuppc storage remotely in sync
>> with drbd and keep snaphshots to roll back weeks. The initial sync
>> and
>> data migration to drbd device took 24hours while- you could reduce
>> backuppc downtime by not doing the dd command in parallel to the
>> initial
>> sync.
>>
>> Only disadvantage is the physical drbd is currently in same building
>> (my
>> home) as the original ESX host. But this is not likely to change due
>> to
>> my low external uplink bandwidth here- someone could use the drbd
>> proxy
>> to use small lines for sync. But this proxy is not available as free
>> software. For me it's fine- if my house burns down I have more
>> serious
>> issues than my BackupPC storage ;-)
>>
>> GReetings
>>
>> Christian
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously
>> valuable.
>> Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance,
>> security
>> threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and
>> makes
>> sense of it. IT sense. And common sense.
>> http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2
>> _______________________________________________
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>> BackupPC-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
>> List:    https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users
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>> Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable.
Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security 
threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes 
sense of it. IT sense. And common sense.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2
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