Koozali.org: home of the SME Server

DAR2 to USB local drive

Offline Agent86

  • ****
  • 592
  • +0/-0
    • http://www.iclbiz.com
DAR2 to USB local drive
« on: June 03, 2008, 06:10:36 PM »
Hi

Below I've listed the log that gets emailed to my admin email account:
I'm not sure what this means and not really sure where to start.
I'm using DAR2 and backing up to an external USB local drive.
I don't know how to interpret these logs ?
Is the backup working or is it not working ?

Please advise Thanks

Connecting to /media/usbdisk1
Expanding /etc/dar2/standardbackup template
Creating /media/usbdisk1/mysite.myxxxxx.com/standardbackup/db.zip   (server name changed for posting to forum)
Expiring old backups
Executing pre-backup event
Verbose logging is off
Performing standardbackup backup
No terminal found for user interaction. All questions will be assumed a negative answer (less destructive choice), which most of the time will abort the program.


 --------------------------------------------
 15150 inode(s) saved
 with 0 hard link(s) recorded
 0 inode(s) changed at the moment of the backup
 0 inode(s) not saved (no inode/file change)      (this is the part I'm concerned about) ??
 0 inode(s) failed to save (filesystem error)        (and this)
 239 inode(s) ignored (excluded by filters)          (and this)
 0 inode(s) recorded as deleted from reference backup
 --------------------------------------------
 Total number of inode considered: 15389
 --------------------------------------------

Listing standardbackup archives on target:
total 5774788
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 681574400 May  4 02:41 2008.05.04.1.dar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 681574400 May  4 02:51 2008.05.04.2.dar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 681574400 May  4 03:02 2008.05.04.3.dar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 681574400 May  4 03:12 2008.05.04.4.dar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 681574400 May  4 03:23 2008.05.04.5.dar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 681574400 May  4 03:34 2008.05.04.6.dar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 681574400 May  4 03:45 2008.05.04.7.dar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 681574400 May  4 03:56 2008.05.04.8.dar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 454925905 May  4 04:03 2008.05.04.9.dar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root     36528 May  4 02:30 db.zip

Total target disk space usage:
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              37G  5.7G   30G  17% /media/usbdisk1

Executing post-backup event
Dismounting /media/usbdisk1

Sun May  4 02:30:01 EDT 2008 - backup started
Sun May  4 04:03:58 EDT 2008 - backup finished

Offline mercyh

  • *
  • 824
  • +0/-0
    • http://mercyh.org
Re: DAR2 to USB local drive
« Reply #1 on: June 03, 2008, 07:42:04 PM »
Looks good to me.

You have of course checked the USB stick to make sure the files are there and have performed a backup restore on a fresh install of SME to test that all is working as planned.

Quote
0 inode(s) not saved (no inode/file change)      (this is the part I'm concerned about) ??

if this said 0 inode(s) saved you would have reason for concern.

Maybe Darrell will weigh in with a full explanation of the report.....

Offline dmay

  • *
  • 450
  • +0/-0
    • http://myezserver.com
Re: DAR2 to USB local drive
« Reply #2 on: June 05, 2008, 05:32:49 AM »
Looks good to me to  :-)

Darrell

Offline Agent86

  • ****
  • 592
  • +0/-0
    • http://www.iclbiz.com
Re: DAR2 to USB local drive
« Reply #3 on: June 13, 2008, 05:19:04 PM »
Looks good to me.

You have of course checked the USB stick to make sure the files are there and have performed a backup restore on a fresh install of SME to test that all is working as planned.

if this said 0 inode(s) saved you would have reason for concern.

Maybe Darrell will weigh in with a full explanation of the report.....

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I have not done any restore, only doing backups, since a restore would require me to install other contribs etc etc.
I just wanted to confirm that the backup is backing up; and that the logs/email I receive is normal for a backup job.

Thanks

Offline mercyh

  • *
  • 824
  • +0/-0
    • http://mercyh.org
Re: DAR2 to USB local drive
« Reply #4 on: June 13, 2008, 06:22:52 PM »
Agent,

I am not trying to insult your intelligence here but any backup procedure that does not have a test restore component is an accident waiting to happen. I may overkill this issue but my standared procedure for setting up a new server includes a full backup. Then I make some minor changes on the server (add a few test users, delete a few other test users) and do a full restore. If this works I am ready to send it out the door. I require that the onsite admins do a test restore of a single file every month. You would be surprised how many times we discover something is not working correctly with the backup. This is a pain and somewhat time consuming but data loss is an expensive mistake (and a mistake is exactly how my bosses view it) in my business.

Offline Agent86

  • ****
  • 592
  • +0/-0
    • http://www.iclbiz.com
Re: DAR2 to USB local drive
« Reply #5 on: June 13, 2008, 07:20:55 PM »
Agent,

I am not trying to insult your intelligence here but any backup procedure that does not have a test restore component is an accident waiting to happen. I may overkill this issue but my standared procedure for setting up a new server includes a full backup. Then I make some minor changes on the server (add a few test users, delete a few other test users) and do a full restore. If this works I am ready to send it out the door. I require that the onsite admins do a test restore of a single file every month. You would be surprised how many times we discover something is not working correctly with the backup. This is a pain and somewhat time consuming but data loss is an expensive mistake (and a mistake is exactly how my bosses view it) in my business.

Thanks for the reply,

It's not insulting, I'm not very knowledgeable about this subject, I've been using SME for several years, however I never had a tape backup or really never set one up because I use to use the backup to desktop feature and I could simply look at the files and sort of confirm that they have been backuped. As you say create a file or something on the server and do a backup to confirm it's working properly.

But in this case my server is now oversized for backup to desktop and I don't have a tape drive, so thats the reason I decided on this DAR2

Anyhow thats a good idea, however I don't want to effect the currently working server. Perhaps I'll do a backup and then try to restore to another machine with a fresh install of SME on it to see how the restore process goes, then I can regularly test this process.

Thanks for the help

One more question ?
Is it perhaps better to just get a tape backup and use the backup restore process thats built into SME by default. Perhaps this would not require me to do continued checking of the backup system ?

What do you think about this ?
Thanks

Offline mercyh

  • *
  • 824
  • +0/-0
    • http://mercyh.org
Re: DAR2 to USB local drive
« Reply #6 on: June 13, 2008, 07:33:40 PM »
I use DAR2 and also Backup With DAR (on different servers) I am migrating to Backup with DAR as I build new servers as it has almost as good functionality as DAR2 and becomes part of the base with 8.0. I do it as a disk-to-disk backup onto a workstation share. For most of my customers this is sufficient. I work at a small Hospital as a full time job. The data at the Hospital is highly critical. I use an offsite backup solution that backs up the file from the workstation share. I feel that this gives me the best of both worlds. I can do a very fast restore from local disk if needed. If the local site should go up in smoke or blow away in a tornado (it is in Kansas) I can pull all the data back from the offsite backup.

I would never go back to using tape or offsite as my only backup source. They have a much larger margin of bugginess and if you ever need to pull a single document that some user inadvertently deleted out of a large tape or offsite backup it becomes an all afternoon project. With disk it is a matter of minutes.

I don't care how much you paid for your backup setup, or how integrated it is into the OS it still needs to be tested.

The bare minimum you should do is create a file in an ibay, let the nightly backup run, delete the file and then attempt to restore it from the backup.


Offline Agent86

  • ****
  • 592
  • +0/-0
    • http://www.iclbiz.com
Re: DAR2 to USB local drive
« Reply #7 on: June 14, 2008, 05:56:46 PM »
I use DAR2 and also Backup With DAR (on different servers) I am migrating to Backup with DAR as I build new servers as it has almost as good functionality as DAR2 and becomes part of the base with 8.0. I do it as a disk-to-disk backup onto a workstation share. For most of my customers this is sufficient. I work at a small Hospital as a full time job. The data at the Hospital is highly critical. I use an offsite backup solution that backs up the file from the workstation share. I feel that this gives me the best of both worlds. I can do a very fast restore from local disk if needed. If the local site should go up in smoke or blow away in a tornado (it is in Kansas) I can pull all the data back from the offsite backup.

I would never go back to using tape or offsite as my only backup source. They have a much larger margin of bugginess and if you ever need to pull a single document that some user inadvertently deleted out of a large tape or offsite backup it becomes an all afternoon project. With disk it is a matter of minutes.

I think I shall work on it some, thanks

If I backup an SME 7.2 server, and install a fresh 7.2 or 8.0, and restore ? will this be a problem.
I believe I should upgrade.

And I also think your right I need to backup and I guess I should learn more about remote backup as you have indicated. This sounds like a good option for me also.

I'ts just my small business server and only about 5 or 6 users, but a few hosted websites also and ftp, so i guess it would be saver to test a little more.

Please tell me more about your remote workstation backup ? and what differences there are with DAR2 and backup with DAR ?

Please advise
Thanks


I don't care how much you paid for your backup setup, or how integrated it is into the OS it still needs to be tested.

The bare minimum you should do is create a file in an ibay, let the nightly backup run, delete the file and then attempt to restore it from the backup.



Offline p-jones

  • *
  • 594
  • +0/-0
Re: DAR2 to USB local drive
« Reply #8 on: June 15, 2008, 11:10:59 AM »
Mercyh

Interested in your comments and totally agree with you re checking out the disaster recovery procedure.

I built a new server a few weeks ago and went through the procedures with Backup with Dar only to find that the permissions on the user accounts were not restored correctly and I had to CHOWN to get it sorted. Has this been your experience ? Have you found a way to overcome it ?

I have taken this to the bugtracker but there has been no progress on it.

Peter
...

Offline mercyh

  • *
  • 824
  • +0/-0
    • http://mercyh.org
Re: DAR2 to USB local drive
« Reply #9 on: June 16, 2008, 03:17:03 PM »
p-jones,

The last one I built was about 2-3 weeks ago. I loaded backup with DAR and did my procedure. I did a full recovery and the machine was smoked. I had a delivery deadline I was against and it was getting late. I did a fresh install, loaded DAR2, ran the test and it worked fine. I shipped the machine.

The above is bad business in the opensource world. My excuse was a deadline. I figured I had done something wrong and didn't have time to sort the problem. Now I will setup a test server and see what happens.

Offline mercyh

  • *
  • 824
  • +0/-0
    • http://mercyh.org
Re: DAR2 to USB local drive
« Reply #10 on: June 16, 2008, 04:07:56 PM »
Agent,

Quote
Please tell me more about your remote workstation backup?
I use one of the many online backup services (the one I use is actually called First Backup) but most of them work the same. It basically runs a service on a workstation and after the initial backup (which can take 24hrs or more) runs something like rsync to patch the original backup. I do not recommend this as the only backup you do. This takes the place of taking a tape home every night to get a backup offsite. A full restore from a backup like this would take 24hrs or longer. In my situation there are stringent laws governing how my data is stored. This would mean that if I took a tape home I would have to be able to controll and log all physical access to that tape. My offsite backup it encrypted with blowfish so is considered secure. (This backup only includes a few very critical files in my case.)

DAR2 was the first good option that I found that could automatically push a backup to a workstation share. I set mine up with a daily job pushed to a share on my workstation. I set it to expire old backups every night. I then run an in house backup solution onto a server that is in a concrete room in the basement. This backup includes workstations and servers throughout the hospital. It also includes the DAR file created by DAR2 and the DB.zip. This backup runs as full every night (not incremented) I have a separate job for every day of week. (Mon, Tues, Wed, Thur) I then have a separate job for 5 weekends (Fri1, Fri2, Fri3, Fri4, Fri5). All of these jobs over write. With this setup I can restore back to any day in the last week and any weekend in the last month.

This is more then likely overkill for most.

I remember from another thread that you were trying to get backup to workstation share working on Linux. Did you ever get this sorted or did you finally give up?


DAR2 and Backup With DAR are very similar. Backup With DAR now has a few more options for backup schedules and the user panel is a bit easier to understand. Both are viable solutions in my mind. See the notes above about Backup with DAR as this needs further testing.

I find that most restores are the result of user error. I have only had a handful of harddrives go bad. I am usually restoring the file that somebody deleted in error last week. That is why I keep the multi-day and multi-weekend schedule. I really need to look into the new shadow copy work that is going on but so far have not had time.


Offline mercyh

  • *
  • 824
  • +0/-0
    • http://mercyh.org
Re: DAR2 to USB local drive
« Reply #11 on: June 16, 2008, 08:29:17 PM »
p-jones,

Can you post your bug link here. Or pm it to me at rh at mercyh dot org. I would like to see your details. I just did a full restore test. Here is what I did.

1. Install fresh server and run all updates.
2. Install Backup with DAR per wiki directions.
3. Create a user, copy some files to that user's home and some other files to the ibay that has that user's group set for rw.
4. run a scheduled backup to workstation share.
5. Delete one file from Ibay, Delete user, Add another user.
6. Blow the server away and reinstall SME, run all updates, Install Backup with DAR.
7. Do a full restore.

Results> All files and users as expected, files have correct User and Group ownerships and correct permissions.

Winscp shows all rights correctly.


My conclusion, This server would be ready to ship with a working backup solution.

I remember what I did on the last server. I took a shortcut and tried to do the restore on the existing server without a new install. I think I have done it this way before and it worked fine, however that is not a true baremetal restore anyway.