Re: Backup information?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 22:58 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Ni hao,
> 
> There doesn't seem to be any information about backups on the sysadmin site
> or the wiki [1]... How are backups currently done? What is backed up? Where
> is the configuration? Who is responsible for it?

 - Backup is done by rsync'ing to a machine at the Red Hat offices in 
   Raleigh; this machine is in the Red Hat tape backup system.

 - I don't have the exact details about how long tape backups are
   preserved in mind. I think it's about a month.

 - The configuration of what is backed up is done
   by /etc/rsyncd/backup.exclude on each machine.

   The current configurations include both the data for the system and
   services, and the OS install. Transient data and remotely mounted
   filesystems are excluded via backup.exclude.

   The new machines label and box are not yet being rsync-ed. Boo. Hiss.
   I just need to find some time to set it up (easy) and make sure that
   they backups are sync'ing correctly (easy, but time consuming).

 - The status of the nightly cron jobs is mailed to me. (*)

 - For recovery of files, ask me. Getting files within 24 hours - from
   the most recent set of backups - is quite trivial. Getting older
   files usually takes a few days to coordinate if it's not urgent.

   We haven't yet had to recover an entire system; my plan would be
   to do a fresh install onto the replacement machine, and then sync the
   backup into a subdirectory of that system (or onto a different
   machine) and compare and put stuff back into place from there.

                                              Owen

(*) I could set this up to mail to gnome-sysadmin, but unfortunately,
    the rsync jobs report "failure" about half the time, even though
    they work perfectly fine. (Some file disappears between the time
    rsync lists files and the point it goes to sync it.) And I'm
    reluctant to spam gnome-sysadmin with 2-3  'rsync of xxx.gnome.org
    failed: 23' messages a day.