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

[Tamas Papp]

On 09/02/2013 12:54 PM, Fred van Zwieten 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).

Why do you depend on glusterfs?

Anyway, rnapshot is good but only in case data is compressible (IMHO).

There are number of similar and free backup solutions and most of them use hardlinks.

If you want to keep backup data on a cluster anyhoy, I suggest you to try Lustre, as it's quite good 
in handling metadata.
If you can consider using single (or separatated) server(s) and metadata is still killing your 
server or you need to keep the same or slightly the same files (eg. after chmod actions, 
moving/renaming directories) in backup for multiple times then zfs or btrfs with snapshot feature 
(and rsync --inplace) could be a good choice. In addition compression and/or deduplication can be 
enabled.


tamas