Re: [Xen-users] Backup domU

[Steve Allison <xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/07/2011 08:54, Simon Hobson wrote:
> Kalil Costa - Brasilsite wrote:
>
> The backup is also on the same disks as the live system.
I don't know why you make this point, as, at least in this thread, the 
target of the backup is not mentioned and is trivial to have it point to 
another system.
> Personally I backup my guests as though they were real (non 
> virtualised) machines. There are many options for this - both free and 
> commercial.
> At work I've setup a system where I have a VM dedicated just to 
> holding backups of the other machines - each of which uses rsync to 
> update a backup copy of itself on the backup server (the server runs 
> rsync in server mode). Thus I have a server holding a complete image 
> of each of my servers at the point they last backed up. Should a host 
> go down, I can move the guests to another host by creating volumes for 
> them and using rsync to pull their files back (mount the guest 
> filesystems on the host, use rsync on the host to pull the files, 
> unmount the filesystems and start the guest).
> Of course, once you are using rsync, then it doesnt' matter whether 
> the destination is on the same host, another host in the same rack, or 
> half way round the world - as long as you have enough bandwidth.
> On my backup machine I then copy the copies to create various levels 
> of historical backups. Again there are various ways of doing this, I 
> settled on StoreBackup which if you disable compression creates full 
> copies which you can just navigate into and use your normal unix/linux 
> tools to access files*. It saves space by hard-linking identical files 
> so it's fairly efficient.
> You can do something similar with rsync and some scripting. Another 
> tool I looked at was rdiff-backup - but I didn't like the way you 
> can't thin out your backups, and they aren't readable without going 
> through the restore process.
A perfect tool for this is backuppc. http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Quick summary of benefits,
 - rsync, smb, ftp support
 - uses hardlinks to create incremental backups,
 - reduces disk space further by compressing and only storing one copy 
of each file across all backups (generates hashes of new files nightly 
to determine duplicates)
 - We have 29 hosts backed up nightly, with historical backups of some 
going back 13 months. Available data in full: 491GB, actual stored 
space: 65GB
 - full set of cmdline tools to manipulate backups
 - restore is trivially easy
 - web interface gives statistics
 - retries failed attempts
 - mails you if a machine is not backed up for X hours.
 - can give user web access to just their own backups (we don't use 
this though, I beleive no web interface is safe)
--
May the ping be with you ..


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