Re: [flexbackup-help] What a shame flexbackup is *almost* there - but I have to reject it

[<fle...@wo...>]

Hi

A couple of comments on your *concerns*

1. Have you the slightest idea how it's done in the reality?
    That's standard procedure to restore full backup plus all=20
    incrementals you have, if you invented some other schema,
    please let me know=20
    (at work we're currently backing up between 15-20 TB / night)
2. What's worse? Dataloss or too much data!!! ;-)=20
    It's up to you to decide that, we do prefer to have more data=20
    than less data, that can always be overcome to reduce the duplicate one=
s,
    the non-existing ones are a lot more difficult to get.
    Regarding finding files, so is flexbackup similar to how the=20
    EMC Networker, Veritas Netbackup, HP Data Protector
    is working, they are all depending on your index/internal database=20
    over all files to get to them quickly.
3. All help is welcome, the open-source community needs
    people that make helpful work.
    Regarding Tape management so privately I'm just backing up to disk,
    is a lot easier and cheaper than to buy a tape library at home.
    (do got several DAT Exchanger at home, but is not just using them)

=2D-Robert

On Fri 28 July 2006 14:23, Peter Valdemar M=F8rch wrote:
> I'm searching for a linux backup solution. And flexbackup is almost it!
> There are three things that make me continue looking for other solutions:
>
> 1) Crashev has asked these questions (twice):
> > My question is - how to restore fully latest backup ? I mean if my
> > system fails today and I want to have the freshest backup restored -
> > how to do it with flexbackup? Should I extract fullbackup with *.0.*
> > and then overwrite files with other days backups or how does it work?
> >  The other thing is how to to tell apart differential from
> > incremental in such scenerio?
>
> These are *very* reasonable questions to be asking of my backup system.
> How do I reliably recreate the "last good state"? Any backup system that
> can't answer these questions are not up to the job, IMHO.
>
> 2) Pablo Godel asked: incremental backups and deleted files
>
> Basically, if I delete files and make incremental backups, the deletion
> of these files is not recorded in the incremental backups. So no, it is
> in fact impossible to reliably get to the last good state.
>
> Also, FAQ "How do I find out which archive(s) contain a certain file?"
>
> on http://www.edwinh.org/flexbackup/faq.html mentions:
> > If you don't know in which archive to find a certain file, look at
> > the log files. As long as you have verbose turned on (default), you
> > can just 'zgrep filename /var/log/flexbackup/*.gz', and that works
> > pretty well.
>
> No, that doesn't work very well. It *sucks*! (Especially if you have to
>   restore 12342345 files and you don't know what they are.) There seems
> to be no way to automatically and reliably restore/extract a backup set.
>
> Adding just a little meta-data to the created backups could enable this
> functionality: I'm thinking a -search option to find the relevant
> archives and -restore to extract from the relevant archives.
>
> 3) There are three Project Admins: edwinh, jjreynold and pholcomb.
> EdwinH, the only one to ever post to the mailing list, last did so
> 2004/01/30 - over two years ago. Basically the project is without
> contributors and maintainers.
>
> I'm tempted to take a stab at adding the meta data to the created and
> backuped data and implementing -restore and -search. I've just never
> used a tape backup system, only to-disk. Would anybody we willing to
> test any such enhancements on a tape-drive?
>
> Peter
>
> ---------------------------------------------
> #!/bin/bash
> # I'd like to be able to restore src with newest file2,
> # file3 and file4 in it. (And no file1)
> # Impossible with current flexbackup, though.
>
> mkdir src
>
> echo line > src/file1
> echo line > src/file2
> echo line > src/file3
> echo line > src/file4
> flexbackup -c flexbackup.conf -set test -level 0
>
> rm src/file1
> echo anotherline > src/file2
> chmod go-rwx src/file3
> ls -l src
>
> sleep 60
> flexbackup -c flexbackup.conf -set test -level 1

=2D-=20
=2D-Robert

Robert Worreby
Birkenweg 82
CH-3123 Belp
http://counter.li.org