Florent Posted March 24, 2009 Report Share Posted March 24, 2009 Hi, Please give me more information about this option ? Can it be used to backup data base ? Or mail server ? Regards, Florent Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted March 24, 2009 Report Share Posted March 24, 2009 This is not a new option. It has always existed in Retrospect. It is designed for the backup of server clients and it prevents users from logging into a server during backup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Florent Posted March 24, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 24, 2009 Ok, thanks. Do you think that the next version can backup mail server from Apple or MySQL without need of stopping the service ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted March 24, 2009 Report Share Posted March 24, 2009 (edited) Ok, thanks. Do you think that the next version can backup mail server from Apple or MySQL without need of stopping the service ? That is not and cannot be possible. A cyrus (and SQL database) needs to be self-consistent during backup, and the internal cyrus caches have to be flushed to the database. Failure to do this is a guaranteed corruption of the cyrus database on restore. A better approach would be to use something like the freeware mailbfr script here: mailbfr which can stop the mail server, checkpoint the cyrus database, etc., then restart the mail server. Then use Retrospect to back up the checkpointed cyrus database. This could be done with "trigger scripts" using the older "Retrospect Event Handler" in Retrospect 6.x and prior; you can do a similar thing here by scheduling the mailbfr script prior to your Retrospect backup of your mail server. The mailbfr checkpointing only takes an instant, and your secondary MX should handle mailbagging and forwarding for that brief outage. Russ Edited March 24, 2009 by Guest Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Florent Posted March 24, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 24, 2009 Sur, I'm using mailbfr. But some other backup software can freeze a computer and backup all data at a point of time. With this solution you can backup every thing (except files in memory). It was a general question ;-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted March 24, 2009 Report Share Posted March 24, 2009 Two points. (1) the "except files in memory" qualification guarantees a corrupt cyrus (and MySQL) database even if an instantaneous copy of the files on disk were to be made. (2) There is one way to make an instantaneous checkpoint of an entire volume, and it has been used by server admins for years (including us) to keep a server up 24/7/365 through backups. That way is to do a "RAID 1 mirror split". Add a member to a RAID 1 array, allow the RAID to rebuild, make services (cyrus, MySQL, etc.) quiescent, split the member from the RAID, bring the services back up. Then back up the split RAID 1 member. The new version of SoftRAID (4.0), due "real soon now", is scriptable so that this can be done as a part of your server backup, and there is a white paper on this issue on the SoftRAID site. http://www.softraid.com/ Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted March 24, 2009 Report Share Posted March 24, 2009 But some other backup software can freeze a computer and backup all data at a point of time. No, some database programs allow commands that will cause them to create a checkpoint of their database; in other cases, a script does exactly what mailbfr does - stop the service (which causes the in-memory database records to be flushed to disk), checkpoint (copy) the database, restart the database program. If you are under the impression that there's another way, you have been misled. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Florent Posted March 24, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 24, 2009 Ok, so what does software like Atempo when it say "Hot backup of leading databases" ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted March 24, 2009 Report Share Posted March 24, 2009 Atempo does not back up Mac OS X Server databases such as MySQL or cyrus. It has a Mac workstation client, but the server backup is only for Windows servers which have support for dumping checkpoints on command. Correct me if I am wrong, but that's my research. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Florent Posted March 24, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 24, 2009 I'don't know ;-) This is general question, the mission of all sysadmin is to search the best solution for the users. Thanks for this informations. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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