[OpenAFS] Re: backup strategy

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Mon, 10 Nov 2014 18:19:31 -0600, Andrew Deason <adeason@sinenomine.net> said:

> Teradactyl's TiBS:
> <http://www.teradactyl.com/backup-solutions/backup-platforms/openafs-backup.html>.
> IIRC Teradactyl likes to trumpet their "synthetic" full dumps, which is
> a feature where they use existing incremental and full dumps to generate
> a new "full" dump every so often. This addresses what you were talking
> about before, because it avoids needing to retain e.g. hundreds of daily
> incrementals, but also avoids needing to periodically dump all data at
> once.

We use TiBS and are quite happy with it.  It understands the "vos
dump" format and is able to index dumps and make synthetic backups as
you describe.  However, it is not able to do file-by-file restores --
the entire volume must be restored.  For this reason we have a policy
restriction on the size of AFS volumes, to ensure that we always have
enough free space to do restores.

On the down side, it is quite expensive (as most enterprise backup
systems are) -- but we get good service from Teradactyl, and they
often report problems to us before we know about them.  However, we
probably wouldn't be using TiBS if we did not also have half a
petabyte of NFS storage and servers to back up.

-GAWollman