[Babase] Papio Information
Ryan Hardy
rh87 at duke.edu
Wed Jun 10 14:53:52 EDT 2009
I just wanted to send out a final bit of information regarding papio.
Some of this came up from discussions Karl and I had, and some was
related to some smaller clean up we were doing.
First, Karl had pointed out that there were two "local" backup scripts
running that were doing the same job: dumping the database to another
partition within the server. After a review of the scripts, I feel
that Karl's modified script is considerably better. Thus, I've
removed the older backup script from /etc/cron.daily.
Second, I've removed the temporary backup of the full database files
from the /disk partition, as the transition from last week seems to be
fine. I do still have a full backup residing on the old disk (that
was once part of the failed pair that started all this); I'll leave
the data on that disk in place until we determine a need for the disk.
Third, I wanted to briefly go over the external backup procedures of
papio. Currently, the only area of the filesystem of papio that is
backed up is "/srv/disk" and all the contents within. This contains
the database backup, the user and group directories, the usr_local
directory (which houses /usr/local) and what looks like the
DocumentRoot for the web sites. This data is backed up fully once per
month (in papio's case, on the third Sunday of the month). "Diffs"
occur every Sunday except the Sunday on which the "Full" performed.
This is basically any data that has changed since the last "Full".
Every other day, "Incremental" backups are done, which is any data
that has changed since the last "Diff". "Diff" and "Full" backups are
sent to tape, while "Incremental" backups are sent to disk on our
backup server.
We currently aim to keep 6 months of "Full" backups, 3 months of
"Diff" backups, and 1 month of "Incremental" backups. One thing worth
mentioning is that we are only able to restore single files (by name)
for a period of about 60 days; after that, we just have to fully
restore the job. I regularly monitor the execution of the jobs and re-
run them if any problems occur. We also periodically test both the
disk-based and tape-based restores, though I haven't been here long
enough to tell you how often that occurs. I did go ahead and restore
a file from May's "Full" backup this afternoon, just to verify. I'm
afraid I can't speak to the motives behind any of these decisions, as
I wasn't around for their discussion leading to this implementation.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
-Ryan
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