Re: dragonfly system backups

["Dmitri Nikulin" <dnikulin@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 4/9/07, Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> wrote:
>     Well, I hit a little snafu.  Nothing big.  It just turns out that even
>     with the memory efficiency enhancements I made to fsck, it still fails
>     (runs out of memory) when you hit 50 million inodes or so.  Not to
>     mention the fact that it takes 12 hours to run, but that's a different
>     issue :-)
>
>     UFS is definitely getting creaky.  I had to reformat my LAN backup
>     machine's /backup partition and start all over again.  I am now doing
>     a full level 0 backup of all the machines and I will adjust the backup
>     system to keep the number of inodes down to a reasonable fsckable
>     level.. that is, not keep as many days worth of backups as it was
>     keeping before.
>
>     Talk about information overload!

Is there a really good reason not to tar the backups? It seems
impossible to have 50 million tarballs/days of backups, so I infer
that you're just doing a straight copy. Or maybe now's the time to
homebrew a more intelligent backup system. Or just make the
journalling layer useful for backups.

---
Dmitri Nikulin

Centre for Synchrotron Science
Monash University
Victoria 3800, Australia