Currently, I'm trying to create a hot backup of a certain low-volume FreeBSD server. Which is kind of like restoring a system after a hardware failure. The problem is, it's not going very well. Which means in case of real failure, things will be even worse. After realizing this, I've begun to search the web for information on backup procedures with FreeBSD. I've read a number of articles and threadsabout backup/restoration, and I still don't see the backup procedure that is straightforward and suitable for my setup.
Here are some constraints and requirements:
1. I don't have a tape drive or hot-swappable HDD's.
2. Database dumps and web-related files are automatically backed up off-site. But that's only useful when you have a working system with the proper software installed. Effectively, I need to backup my software setup, not variable data.
3. Preferably, backups should be simple files, which could be burned to a CD, transferred over SFTP, etc. Not something complex and ephemeral.
I tried doing dump/restore. Dump went fine, I have 3 dumps of my partitions on the original server's harddrive. The restore was a mess, I still didn't brought a single partition online on a new system.
First, there is a problem of transferring files to a new system. Using USB stick is horribly slow, and when I do a restore while booted from fixit CD, the utility seems to just freeze over. I tried using -v flag, but it didn't help much in determining whether it's just very slow or frozen.
Restore is a problem, because it's done on a new system, using fixit CD. I don't have any disk space, since the disk is used as a target of restore. I don't have any scripts/programs aside from the CD content, since I'm on a new system.
Also, the restoration procedure is very involved and there are many ways to go wrong. For example, is it okay to have files on the partitions that are being uses as a target of restore? Plus, restore needs a tmp/ diretory. Is it okat to just mount the appropriate partition from dev/ folder?
Is there something simpler? It would be much easier to get the backup snapshots directly over sftp/ftp from some other serer. It would be even better if snapshots contained partitioning information, and did not require mounting, newfsing, and so on.
One thing I can probably do is to make an extra partition on the target system, which will hold the backups. Install FreeBSD, transfer backups to that partition via SFTP, reload with fixit CD, mount it the partition with backups, and so on. But that's a lot of extra steps.
Is there any way to do fusefs w/ ssh from something that runs off a CD? That would be an ideal solution, I guess.
Here are some constraints and requirements:
1. I don't have a tape drive or hot-swappable HDD's.
2. Database dumps and web-related files are automatically backed up off-site. But that's only useful when you have a working system with the proper software installed. Effectively, I need to backup my software setup, not variable data.
3. Preferably, backups should be simple files, which could be burned to a CD, transferred over SFTP, etc. Not something complex and ephemeral.
I tried doing dump/restore. Dump went fine, I have 3 dumps of my partitions on the original server's harddrive. The restore was a mess, I still didn't brought a single partition online on a new system.
First, there is a problem of transferring files to a new system. Using USB stick is horribly slow, and when I do a restore while booted from fixit CD, the utility seems to just freeze over. I tried using -v flag, but it didn't help much in determining whether it's just very slow or frozen.
Restore is a problem, because it's done on a new system, using fixit CD. I don't have any disk space, since the disk is used as a target of restore. I don't have any scripts/programs aside from the CD content, since I'm on a new system.
Also, the restoration procedure is very involved and there are many ways to go wrong. For example, is it okay to have files on the partitions that are being uses as a target of restore? Plus, restore needs a tmp/ diretory. Is it okat to just mount the appropriate partition from dev/ folder?
Is there something simpler? It would be much easier to get the backup snapshots directly over sftp/ftp from some other serer. It would be even better if snapshots contained partitioning information, and did not require mounting, newfsing, and so on.
One thing I can probably do is to make an extra partition on the target system, which will hold the backups. Install FreeBSD, transfer backups to that partition via SFTP, reload with fixit CD, mount it the partition with backups, and so on. But that's a lot of extra steps.
Is there any way to do fusefs w/ ssh from something that runs off a CD? That would be an ideal solution, I guess.