Re: [BackupPC-users] replicating backup servers offsite

[Glenn <gl...@na...>]

Rich Duzenbury wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-02-18 at 14:58 -0600, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:
> 
>>I know people ask about this all the time; but I don't recall anyone
>>actually mentioning how they went about it, and whether there were any
>>pitfalls along the way.
>>
>>If someone wants to replicate the backed-up data to another machine offsite;
>>what's the best way to do this? (other than the removable-drive technique
>>that Les uses... something fully automated).
>>
>>My theory is to just do an rsync backup from the backuppc server to another
>>box; but the problems I can see are:
>>- if done with backuppc itself, this requires an extra step in the restore
>>  process (restore the backup server, then do your restores from that).
>>- rsync can crush a box to the point it can hang, if it's trying to index &
>>  sync millions of files. (it did the time I tried to sync a backuppc pool
>>  from one drive to another).
>>
>>Has anyone done this? 
>>
> 
> I use LVM and snapshot the drive.  Then I use dd_rescue to copy it to a
> removable hard drive in the same machine.  This copies the entire
> partition, empty blocks and all, but I copy about 80Gb in 90 minutes.
> 'cp -a' takes many hours.   Of course this doesn't help much, because
> it's not in a remote location.
> 
> I've seen reference to this trick, but never tried it:
> tar cf - / | ssh -C host 'cd /mnt; tar -xf -'
> I would think you would have to stop backuppc and unmount the drive for
> this to be safe.
> 
> For a 'live' backup to a remote device, I've been considering the
> 'Enhanced Network Block Device'.  Again, haven't yet tried it.
> http://www.it.uc3m.es/ptb/enbd/
> Also, I don't know that it supports any kind of encryption.
> 
> 
> --
> Regards,
> Rich
>

Another trick to try is to use dd_rescue and netcat to another box.  I 
have not use dd_rescue |nc  to replicate a backuppc pool but have used 
it to copy a partition to a drive in a another box.
ie: dd_rescue if=/dev/???? - | nc 192.168.0.1 port -w 3

Glenn