[Gluster-devel] [Gluster-users] Backup bricks?

[Avra Sengupta]

Yes for long term backups LVM snapshots might not be the solution. There 
is no side effect in backing up the bricks. The data would indeed be 
readable. And if you back up "/var/lib/glusterd/vols/<volname>" on each 
volume as well, you can effectively recreate the volume from the bricks 
at a later stage.

Regards,
Avra

On 08/17/2015 04:11 PM, Thibault Godouet wrote:
>
> Thanks Avra.
>
> I am aware of the Gluster snapshots, but didn't think about using them 
> on the offsite replica.  That could indeed cover the short term 
> backups, and be used to do longer term backups from.
>
> What I perhaps wasn't clear about is that we'll need longer term 
> backups to tape (e.g. to keep multiple years).  I don't think keeping 
> LVM snapshots for that long would really work.
> So basically my initial question was on whether backing up the brick 
> instead of the volume, which would be significantly faster, would be a 
> good idea: would the data be readable ok? Any known side effect that 
> could cause issues?
>
> On 17 Aug 2015 10:12 am, "Avra Sengupta" <asengupt at redhat.com 
> <mailto:asengupt at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Thibault,
>
>     Instead of backing up, individual bricks or the entire thin
>     logical volume, you can take a gluster volume snapshot, and you
>     will have a point in time backup of the volume.
>
>     gluster snapshots internally use thin lv snapshots, so you can't
>     move the backup out of the system. Also having the backup on the
>     same filesystem as the data doesn't protect you from device
>     failure scenarios. However in events of any other data loss or
>     corruption, you can restore the volume from the snapshot, mount
>     the read-only snapshot and copy the necessary files.
>
>     In order to take backup at a remore site, using geo-rep is
>     recommended.
>
>     Regards,
>     Avra
>
>     On 08/17/2015 02:27 PM, Thibault Godouet wrote:
>>
>>     I have a 1 x 2 = 2 volume geo-replicated to a single-brick volume
>>     in another physical site, where I would like to set up a backup.
>>
>>     I could setup a backup on a mount of the volume, but a quick test
>>     shows it is slow in this setup (presumably because there are
>>     loads of small files on there).
>>
>>     Instead I thought I could maybe backup the filesystem where the
>>     brick is (or rather a snapshot of the thin logical volume).  My
>>     understanding is that all the files will be in there, and
>>     readable, so it seems to me it would be fine to back things up
>>     from there.
>>
>>     Is that right, or am I missing something here?
>>
>>     Note the .glusterfs directory would also be backed up too,
>>     although I'm not sure whether that would be of any use in a backup.
>>
>>     More generally is there a recommended way to setup backups?
>>
>>     Thanks,
>>     Thibault.
>>
>>
>>
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