[OpenAFS] Backup AFS with BackupPC?

[Stephen Joyce]

On Sun, 8 Oct 2006, seth vidal wrote:

> Specifically I'm interested in how many of them can do:
>  - volumeset backups or backup by wildcarded volume/partion names
>  - full volume restores
>  - directory restores preserving acls
>  - individual file restores
>  - incremental backups
>  - backups spanning tapes
>  - 100+GB volume backups and restores

Seth,
I suspect you already know the answers..

I'm not aware of anything, short of running two disparate backup solutions,
or maybe mirroring your entire cell to another, that will do all that you
ask. The two flavors of backing up AFS, as I understand them, are to either
backup AFS's contents via "normal" methods (tar, rsync, etc), which
accesses files via the fileserver and generally doesn't capture ACL or
volume metadata, or to backup the volumes, which accesses the volserver and
has the benefit of backing up directory ACLs, volume quotas, etc, but
treats volumes, rather than files, as the backup unit.

So any single solution is unlikely to have all the qualities that you ask
for. Doing vos dumps and restores to disk still treats volumes as atomic,
so there's no way to restore a single file or directory without restoring
its volume first... and that's more cumbersome as volume size increases.
However, by taking butc out of the equation and backing up directly to
disk, you don't have the tape-spanning issues you alluded to and your
volume sizes are not limited by the size of your tapes, unless you go on to
back up to tape via backula, amanda, tar, or other method.

But like I said, I suspect that you knew all of that...

Someone please correct me if any of the above sounds wrong.

As for me, I'll probably use backula to do remote offsite backups of
backuppc's level 0 dumps periodicly, but that's not set in stone yet. Oh
and FWIW, I do have backuppc utilizing volumesets for backups. Of course,
just like the AFS native backups, there's no individual file or directory
restores without first restoring the volume. :-\

I wonder how many of the original AFS developers' eyes would roll back in
their heads at the prospect of 100+ GB volume backups and restores.

> -sv
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