[SLL] How do I back up LVM Volumes to Tape...?

[Chuck Wolber]

On Thu, 6 Dec 2007, Todd Carrico wrote:

> We recently replaced our company server with a shiny new Dell which came 
> preinstalled with SuSE Enterprise and LVMs.  We got everything all set 
> and running, and now I cannot seem to find any way to back up our 200+GB 
> partitions to our SCSI 400G tape drives.  All I can find is information 
> on doing snapshots and using crude programs like tar that do not support 
> incrementals and interactive restores.  I would really prefer to do 
> dumps with varying backup levels to tape.  Can this be done with LVMs or 
> do I need to rebuild the entire system with ext2/3 partitions.  I cannot 
> imagine people are using LVM commercially without any means to backup to 
> tape.  Is there a special version of dump for LVM?  Can I do snapshots 
> to a hard partition (ext2/3) and then dump that to tape.  What am I 
> missing? Please advise...


Hmmm, first things first, it's LVM, not LVMs. 

The fact that you have LVM as your underlying block device is irrelevant. 
You're backing up an ext3 filesystem, not the logical volumes (yes, that's 
a bit existential, but let's keep our feet on the ground for now...). To 
back up your server, you can use any backup system you want. If you really 
care about your data and don't have a full time systems administrator, 
then I'd recommend going with a commercial backup software solution. Just 
google for "Linux Tape Backup" and you should find plenty of options. I 
used to use BRU and had a love/hate relationship with Arkeia. There's also 
Lone Tar, but I've never used it so I have no idea...

That all being said, why did you choose tape backup??? It's slow, 
expensive and terribly unreliable. The first time you have to restore a 
single file from a stack of incremental 200GB tape backups, you'll regret 
your decision to go with tape.

Most backups these days are going to online disk based backup (where 
"online" doesn't mean "Internet"). A quick and dirty solution is to 
replace your incredibly expensive tape drive with a hot-swap drive bay and 
just backup to cheap harddrives. Restoration is a snap (just copy files) 
and incremental backups are just a "cp -al" and rsync away. Take the 
harddrives to the safe deposit box once a week. Since you can probably fit 
hundreds of incremental backups to a 1TB drive given that your source 
array is only 200GB, you only need a few drives to ensure you have good 
offsite backups.

A more robust solution is to have a separate data backup server onsite or 
located remotely in a datacenter. Given the fantastically cheap price of 
disks, you can pack a lot of incrementals in a very little place. 

(Shameless Plug) QLL has been doing online remote databackup for several 
years now. Contact me offlist if you are interested in our service or just 
want details on how to do it yourself.

..Chuck..


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