Mirroring files over servers

[David Brownlee]

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006, Steve Mynott wrote:

> [...]
> For this reason, and the possibility of rolling back changes, I now use
> "rdiff-backup" and can recommend "backupninja" -- "a silent flower blossom
> death strike to lost data".  However, you might be better off renaming that
> one if presenting it as a solution to a PHB as "Enterprise Backup Solution
> Pro" or similar.

 	Just to chime in: I used rdiff-backup for a while and almost
 	really liked it - it keeps a 'rsync style' most recent copy,
 	and compressed diffs going back each version (rather like RCS
 	really :). I ended up switching away for two reasons:

 	a) It needs to get a complete sync in a session, or the
 	   next session will have to rollback first. My data-nazi
 	   half liked this, but my "some of my machines are at the
 	   end of a lousy link and the file delta is sometimes too
 	   large for one session" half made rude gestures.

 	b) Very, very, very rarely some of my machines would eat their
 	   rdiff-backup repository, losing all but the 'rsync style'
 	   latest copy. Neither of my halves thought much of that.

 	I'm currently on rsnapshot. Its a very simple wrapper around
 	rsync, but each time it runs it rotates each backup, rsync's
 	with hardlinks the most recent to a new dir, and then rsyncs
 	over that. Net result is a 'real' browsable copy of each
 	snapshot, with only an extra inode cost for each copy of
 	a file that doesn't change. It also handles 'run this script
 	into temp dir and then rsync results for db backups etc'.

 	Its simple, and... sucks less than anything else I've used,
 	but I'm still open to offers.

> SSHFS also looks interesting:
> 
> http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html

 	Mmmmm, fuse good.

 	Out of curiosity, what hardware RAID5 box are you using?
 	I've tended throw software RAID1 at any box that moves
 	(though the beancounters only let me have single Raptors
 	for some of the test boxes), but I have a couple of machines
 	which are going to need serious space and raid5 without NV
 	buffering tends to exhibit suckage of a "donkey through a
 	straw" level.

-- 
 			   David Brownlee -- abs at absd.org