Topic: How to backup SME completely (a la Ghost/Acronis) for complete system recovery?

[janet]

mike_mattos

I may be paranoid, but I hate to see rebuilds when both drives have the same data but with different dates, I feel much safer plugging in a bare drive.

Indeed you should (ie MUST) blank any drive BEFORE you reuse it (at least when using sme software RAID), using the dd command or another partition deleting utility such as delpart.exe
If your system rebuilds the array to the older data (due to a pre-existing unknown problem) then all the current data will be lost, and you may not even realise this has happened until some time later.
There was a classic example of this in bugzilla a couple of years ago that Charlie very cleverly tracked down.

[janet]

reqman

.....joomla.....is installed under /home/e-smith/files/ibays/Primary/
Therefore, it seems I might be covered, correct?

If it is truly installed there then it will be included in standard backups
cd /home/e-smith/files/ibays/Primary
ls -al
should confirm

[mike_mattos]

OK, so if I make an image of the removed mirror drive, load the image onto a new hard drive, and then put that drive into the chassis, have I met the bare metal restore rules?   

Disk Images are getting more interesting now that cloud storage has become so cheap,  and download speeds so high, keeping disk images seems like a reasonable thing to do, rather than worry that a CD copy of the right version of SME is going to be available when needed, that the contribs will come back to life if restoring on a different version.  I noticed some but not all  machines moved from 7.5.1 to 7.6 despite the Software Installer saying they were up to date.  I don't have CD's of all the dot versions,  but I do have cloud backups of servers, just not disk images.   

[janet]

mike_mattos

re raid, I use the hardware in dumb mode, so SME does the mirror, the cage just allows the drives to be switched without opening the case or shutting down the server.

The cage holds 3 drives in carriers, typically  SATA 1,2,3.     SME only ever sees SATA1 and SATA2, the third drive is just stored but not powered on,  and moved to the SATA2 slot when the loaded SATA2 drive is removed as a backup.

Are you saying that you already use this configuration and it works OK ?
Are you saying that sme is configured for software RAID1 ?

In a true hardware RAID, sme would only see your hardware RAID drives as a single drive.

Are you saying you can remove a drive, replace it with a blank drive, and the sme admin control panel for drive management will see this new drive and add it to the array when prompted, all without powering down sme, and this is on sme8.0 final ?

[mike_mattos]

The drive cage is called an  SAS/SATA backplane, supports software raid 0,1, and with a RAID controller, Raid 5.  Can hold 3 live drives, but I use 2 live with the third bay only as a place to store the spare. 

Yes, I've hot swapped drives with SME7, using SME software RAID1   possible an 8 beta but not sure. 

At least once it worked with no intervention, no powering down.   

[janet]

mike_mattos

I noticed some but not all  machines moved from 7.5.1 to 7.6 despite the Software Installer saying they were up to date.

That was probably caused by not correctly updating the servers with the new repository locations due to Centos 4 EOL. There were about 3 "corrections" needed IIRC, refer sticky forum thread.

[mike_mattos]

I had a bad case of Monday morning, and rather than do a controlled drive swap, managed to actually induce a raid error by resetting the drive cage rather than powering down drive 1.  The error would not self correct, either before or after I did a drive replacement.   

The good news is, the drive cage allowed BOTH HARD DRIVES to be powered down at the same time, then powered up, and SME Server 8.0 continued working and did not require a reboot.   However, I didn't want to do a manual repartition and rebuild, so I rebooted the system.   I then used the admin panel to instal the replacement drive which had been automatically detected.   

I'll try again after the array rebuilds and I've had more coffee to just swap drives around, but the major point is, the hot swap feature worked allowing drive replacement without opening the case or powering down, while the server continued to function.

[Knyte]

Having used both Ghost and Acronis, I prefer Acronis...personal preference.  The features and price point are great.

Yes, there are more granular ways of making backups...as discussed previously.  Can't beat Acronis for bare-metal.  Not sure why it isn't recommended - maybe someone can advise?

[erykwol]

use something like vmware esx, proxmox ve or another virtualization solution, virtualize your SME and do a full backup of your virtual machine..

this is the only way to achieve what you are asking for..

I agree with Stefano.
At this moment I have 3 virtualized installations of SME Server.
First is running 2 years without any problems on Vmware ESXi.
The two others are on Proxmox VE 2.1 and working great.
I chose Proxmox due to very good performance and outstanding bare-metal backup functionality with snapshots.

This is the disk read performance of th virtualized SME Server on Proxmox (Quad core Xeon 2.0GHz, 6GB RAM, 1TB Samsung SpinPoint drive's in Raid10):
[root@server05 Panel]# hdparm -tT /dev/hda2
/dev/hda2:
 Timing cached reads:   12532 MB in  2.00 seconds = 6274.26 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  1668 MB in  3.02 seconds = 551.76 MB/sec

Write performance:
[root@server05 Panel]# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 4.05718 seconds, 258 MB/s

Snapshot backup of running SME Server virtual machine with 350GB virtio disk:

[root@server05 Panel]# df -k
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2            349901188   4873644 326966876   2% /
/dev/hda1               101018     19680     76122  21% /boot
tmpfs                  2075824         0   2075824   0% /dev/shm

Vzdump:
INFO: starting new backup job: vzdump 200 --remove 0 --mode snapshot --compress lzo --storage zfs --node proxmox
INFO: Starting Backup of VM 200 (qemu)
INFO: status = running
INFO: backup mode: snapshot
INFO: ionice priority: 7
INFO: Logical volume "vzsnap-proxmox-0" created
INFO: creating archive '/zfsfast/dump/vzdump-qemu-200-2012_07_13-10_46_22.tar.lzo'
INFO: adding '/zfsfast/dump/vzdump-qemu-200-2012_07_13-10_46_22.tmp/qemu-server.conf' to archive ('qemu-server.conf')
INFO: adding '/mnt/vzsnap0/images/200/vm-200-disk-1.qcow2' to archive ('vm-disk-ide0.qcow2')
INFO: Total bytes written: 17344956928 (66.43 MiB/s)
INFO: archive file size: 3.67GB
INFO: Finished Backup of VM 200 (00:04:26)
INFO: Backup job finished successfully
TASK OK

Works great!

Eryk