Re: [cobalt-users] Is is possible to "mirror" RAQ2s?

["cobalt-users" <cobalt-users@xxxxxxx>]

Just a two-penny's worth: like many others (I assume), we keep it simple
as one-off daily backups are sufficent for our needs. 

I wrote two simple shell scripts and dropped them into /etc/cron.daily. 
One script copies the compressed log files (as generated by logrotate)
from each site in turn to an archive subdirectory and also rename them
with the day's date. The other script runs through the site /web folders
in turn and tars & gzip's it into a single archive in a backup folder
elsewhere on the machine.  Then, later on, another machine comes along and
FTP's the archived logs and the site backup gzip off the RAQ to elsewhere.

The scripts are simple shell 'until' loops which count up to the number of
sites on the RAQ, pulling files from /home/siteXX each time through the
loop. I manually update a text file to hold the highest site number and
read that in for each script - thus each time I add a new site, I just
increment the number in the text file and all is taken care of. (If I was
a better script kiddie I'd get it to do that a bit more elegantly, but
hey, it works...)

This method gives us an immediate-to-hand daily backup on our RAQ2 itself,
plus a copy elsewhere (physically in a different co-location facility)
just in case of machine failure. The renaming of the log files also helps
our stats server software cope easier... :-)

Simple, and it works. No tape drives in co-lo to worry about. However,
this approach (and I suppose tape backup in general as opposed to a true
server-server mirror) is not suitable for busy sites with lots of updates
throughout the day though, as the last backup may be up to 24 hours out of
date...

Regards,

SB


Scott Bartlett  (scott@xxxxxxx)
BTA Limited
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