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Old 27th May 2008
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phoenix phoenix is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by stukov View Post
Is anybody aware of a software that specializes in remote backups? I know I could do it with a simple implementation of rsync but if there is anything else more elegant am I willing to give it a try. The problem am I trying to solve is the bandwidth required to backup a complete machine in case of disaster or just to roll-back a few days ago files erased by mistake.
We're in the testing stages of using rsync to clone all our Linux servers to a FreeBSD 7 system running zfs. Each server gets it's own directory under /storage, and a snapshot of /storage is taken after every run. This way, /storage/serverA contains the current files for serverA, and /storage@<date>/serverA contains the files for serverA from <date>.

We're looking at building a webpage around it that allows techs to login, see their servers, and then browse the file tree for the servers to restore individual files or directories. The nice thing about ZFS is that you can access the files in any of the snapshots without having to mount the snapshot. /storage/.zfs/snapshot contains the directory tree of all the snapshots.

So far, things look good. The initial rsync of a server takes a couple of hours and transfers a lot of data. The subsequent rsync runs transfer only the data that has changed, and takes maybe 10 minutes across an E10 link (an hour across an ADSL link due to the horrid upload speeds).

Our backup server has 9 TB of disk space, which should allow us to keep 30 days worth of snapshots for the 30 or so servers we'll be backing up, along with a few "monthly" snapshots.

The other nice thing about ZFS is that we can "clone" our backup server to an offsite server simply by running:
Code:
zfs send /storage@<date> | ssh remoteserver 'zfs receive /storage@<date>'
This sends a single stream of bits from one server to the next across an SSH connection. Much faster than rsync from one server to the next.

No software needs to be installed on the remote servers. Everything is done from the backup server, using simple sh scripts, rsync, and ssh.
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