[Gluster-users] FW: Backup / Restore for Gluster volumes.

[James]

On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 6:54 AM, Fred van Zwieten <fvzwieten at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is an interesting topic. I too am looking for a backup tool that is
> "glusterfs friendly". I am looking at rsnapshot, but I want to use glusterfs
> as a backup target and rsnapshot relies heavily on hardlinks. Hardlinks are
> a special case in glusterfs and I am not sure if rsnapshot is the right
> solution for me. I am also looking at Bacula. My use case btw is tens of
> thousands of tiff images scatered among directories. These tiff images
> sometimes get moved around and even hole subdirectories get moved around.
> rsnapshot nor bacula handle that elegantly. snapshotting would, but that is
> not build into glusterfs and lvm snapshots are not supported (in RHS).
>
> Groeten,
>
> Fred


My understanding was that hardlinks are slower in gluster because of
additional lookups that are needed to resolve the data. Having said
that, it might still be faster than copying around files, and maybe
someone is working to improve hardlink performance. One of the core
gluster devs will know more about this.

One backup idea could involve having a large gluster volume which
rsnapshots to itself for backup. To restore, you could just hardlink
the files back. I haven't thought about this a lot, but it might be
something to look into. This obviously doesn't help you for offsite
backups in case of a total disaster, so you'll still need to
geo-replicate for safety.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas.

James