Re: [BackupPC-users] Yet another "moving backuppc" question

[Les M. <les...@gm...>]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Kameleon <kam...@gm...> wrote:
> Thanks for the reply Les. Unfortunately setting up a "new backuppc"
> and leaving the old is not an option in our case. Here is our
> situation:
>
> When we initially ordered this server we ordered it with 32GB ram,
> dual quad-core xeon's, and 8x 2TB drives. We had to pass it off as a
> "backup server" to get the funding through. So as soon as we got it, I
> setup Xen on the physical host and then got to carving out LV's for
> virtual machines. One of which was the 6TB for the backuppc store. Now
> here we are a few years later and we are wanting to remove the disks
> from this host and swap them with another physical server that has 8x
> 750GB drives. This is so that we can move the backuppc server onto the
> physical host and to a different building away from the hosts it is
> backing up. So I have to move everything off this physical host,
> including the 6TB backuppc data store. I am trying to move everything
> I can to the SAN. However my problem with moving stuff is compounded
> by the version of CentOS we are running having issues with the hosts
> iscsi offload driver. So to get all the other servers off this host we
> are recreating them on a separate host and manually rsync'ing the
> configs and such over to the new hosts. This still leaves the backuppc
> data. I don't have a problem doing the rsync way if it is the only
> reasonable option. However I wanted to run it by you guys to make sure
> I wasn't missing something obvious.

The 'rsync pool/cpool, follow with BackupPC_tarPCCopy' is probably the
fastest approach, but you are still going to have a long downtime (you
can't let anything change during the whole operation).  I'd say the
effort is misguided considering the price of new 2 TB drives these
days, and I'd want to be really sure about that iscsi issue before
losing the copy on the local drives.   If you are running an older
CentOS, maybe you could add a new VM and mount your old partition into
it to see if that helps.

Depending on how much you expect to need the old history, you might
just make a few tar-image snapshots from different points in time with
BackuPC_tarCreate.   If you need more than a few, they might take more
overall space but you can be selective about what you save and put it
on different media.  With that approach you could let your new system
start running and overlap that with extracting what you want from the
old one.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     les...@gm...