rsync] Live DB backups with rsync?

R P Herrold herrold at owlriver.com
Tue Jan 14 22:40:01 EST 2003


On Tue, 14 Jan 2003, Steve Mallett wrote:

> Is it possible to do live backups of a running DB with rsync???
> 
> I was just talking to livevault.com & they (only on win boxes) say they 
> can grab changes from a client's live DB & sync them remotely.
> 
> It sounded like BS to me, but I'm neither a DB guy or sync'ing expert.

I've done with unix DB, DB4, and MySQL backends [not of
choice, but sometimes, there's no other way, as when a hard
drive is dying, and you _know_ you will never be able to power
it on again ...] -- it works this way --

1.  Rsync the directory tree holding the database
2.  Re-run the command
3.  Keep re-running it, and eventually, you'll get an 
essentially immediate return with no content being moved.

... at this point stop.  You hit a time when the database was 
largely quiescent, and so was unchanged -- 

-- there will be some open locks and and open transactons will 
be lost -- but no worse than an unplanned reboot due to a 
power loss.

In a production environment, it seems to me that better ways 
usually exist.

-- Russ Herrold




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