SUMMARY: news DB on an AdvFS, backup

From: <terzic_at_mda.ca>
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 1996 18:19:11 -0800

we were in need for news backup as we have lots of local groups, we
gateway mailing lists archives into news database and we consider it as a
great source of informations.
unfortunately vdump nor tar are performing well, so we are giving up Internet
news backup completely.
 the bottleneck can't be tapedrive nor network in this case, but
rather inefficient DU tools, dealing with large number of files (>400.000).

thanks to all people who replied!
i'm attaching all replies as opinions are divergent.

- -------------------

From: ron_barrett_at_corp.Cubic.COM
        I'd recommend converting your news filesystem to UFS. It should be
dramatically more efficient for services such as news which require many,
small files.

From: Anthony D'Atri <aad_at_nwnet.net>
Why back up news? Almost nobody does.

From: king_at_reston.ans.net (Greg King)
We use tar over an rsh connection to a remote machine and are able to
tar cvf and read it back with tar tvf (3.5 Gig) in less than 4 hours.

From: jcraig_at_gfs.com (Jonathan B. Craig)
I wrote a perl script that reads a table of filesystems and then clones
(need ADVFS utilities)
clones the filesystems to allow online backup. Our database is Oracle and
the scenario is as
follows:

1) Stop the oracle database
2) Clone and mount all filesystem ( i mount to /clonefs as root and each
filesystem in its respective
location ergo: / = /clonefs /usr = /clonefs/usr etc).
3) Start the oracle database
4) Networker backup.

        pros - only takes system down approx 5 minutes
        cons - reduced performance during backup, must leave space in domain
to support
                all blocks that will change during backup

In response to the first con we have begun setting the database backup flag
and triping a log change.
We believe this will leave all files in a recoverable state without taking
the server down at all.
We still need to test the "recoverability" of this design.

Hope this gives you some ideas. If you use oracle I hear they are
re-introducing their online backup
software.

From: Hellebo Knut <Knut.Hellebo_at_nho.hydro.com>
YES, vdump is slow (at least up to 3.2C)

From: Carlos Sanchez <csanchez_at_cirp.es>
I don't know if the problem is the block size, but a vdump of all files
in my sistem (> 3GB) takes around 70 minutes.

From: Richard Rogers <ittrmr_at_staffs.ac.uk>
We made a decision not to back up news articles. (Why? They will be
gone in a few days anyway).

From: John Stoffel <john_at_WPI.EDU>
Why do you bother backing up news? It's not like you have enough room
to keep more than a few days of articles if you have a full feed. If
you only have a limited feed and an expire time of 10-20 days or so,
then it might be worth backing up.
        We don't back up news here. Instead of doing an incremental, I'd just
do a full dump instead, it would almost certainly be much faster.
It actually seems to be reasonably fast, with the tape device being
the slow part of the chain. You don't mention what media you are
doing the backups to, could that be the bottleneck you're seeing?

- --
Veselin Terzic | MacDonald Dettwiler
MIME accepted terzic_at_mda.ca | 13800 Commerce Parkway
Phone: (604) 278-3411 Fax: 278-3786| Richmond, B.C.;Canada V6V 2J3
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Received on Wed Feb 21 1996 - 03:34:13 NZDT

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