Topic: Backup to IDE HD??

[Rob F]

We have been using 4.1 since December and have found it to be great. However we have just replaced it with a Compaq NeoServer 150 because it was going to be easier for the non techs here to use now that I am no longer in the office. The biggest advantage that it has is the built in IDE 17gig drive in a caddy for backup. I know it is not as elegant as a tape system but for us it would be the perfered option. Is is possible to do this under E-Smith???
Thanks
Rob

[Rob Hillis]

Rob F wrote:

> We have been using 4.1 since December and have found it to be
> great. However we have just replaced it with a Compaq
> NeoServer 150 because it was going to be easier for the non
> techs here to use now that I am no longer in the office. The
> biggest advantage that it has is the built in IDE 17gig drive
> in a caddy for backup. I know it is not as elegant as a tape
> system but for us it would be the perfered option. Is is
> possible to do this under E-Smith???

It may not be ideal for what you want, but I have my own backup solution for e-smith that covers just about everything...

Save the following contents to /etc/cron.daily/backup, and all shall be done...

------8><--------
cd /
nice -n 12 tar cX /etc/tar.exc / | compress >//e-smith.tar.z
------8><--------

Then save the following contents to /etc/tar.exc...

------8><--------
/proc/*
/boot/*
/dev/*
/var/spool/squid
/mnt/*
e-smith.tar.z
------8><--------

Add or remove any directories from the above list you feel necessary... (I exclude the squid cache, because it's rather large, and including it tends to run me out of HD space during the backup)

When/if you need to do a complete restore, it's as simple as...

cd /
cat //e-smith.tar.z | tar xv

The one disadvantage of this is that it does *not* integrate through the E-Smith administration console.

[Serge Dutremble]

I have done the backup to disk configuration and it works fine if you configure your backups to be contained in a backup file smaller than 2GB.

2GB seem to be a limitation of the EXT2 file system used on E-Smith.

Discussions I have read somewhere specifies that the backup script used by E-Smith does not support multiple dump files when using a backup to disk.

I use tar and gzip with save to disk (in actual fact, a Castlewood 2.2 GB ORB removable cartridge).  I found out that I can do a daily backup of my users files separately by adding a separate backup line in the backup script.  However, I had to make a change to move the older backup files to disk abd wiping the OPB cartridge before I can do a new day.  I keep 5 ORB changed each week day.

The whole process is not too bad from the users point of view as they only have to change the ORB each morning.  The modified backup scripts does:

mount the ORB
copy files on ORB to the fixed disk as archived files
erase all files on the ORB
do backup of each client files individually
unmount the ORB

The clients know they can go back to the ORB cartridge if they need a file backed up less than 5 days ago.  They go to a samba shared directory containing all the archived backup for any older backups.

This is not too good if the system disk fails though.  But this is sufficient for them at this time.

The user backup files are getting close to 200 MB each do I have some room left until I have to get them something else.

Hope this helps.

Serge