best practices: automatic backups of .tdb files with samba 3.0?

[Simo Sorce]

On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 03:07 -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> Andrew Bartlett recently brought it to my attention that in Samba 3.0, tdbs
> are not journalled databases, with the consequence that a server failure
> (say, power loss) can result in tdb corruption.  Since hardware failures are
> a fact of life, should we in Debian be automatically backing up the important
> .tdbs on a regular basis?  What are the best practices of other distributors
> in this area?

I remember a post on samba lists with the list of databases that should
be backed up, if you can't find it, please report here, and I will try
to give you the list.

With tdbbackup we can do a backup and I find out that doing a regular
backup for critical tdbs like other debian packages do for /etc/passwd
and friends is a very goo idea.

We may also do 'fake' backups of non persistent dbs to find out if they
have gone silently corrupt (that may happen if the user insist on
installing the tdbs on a non supported filesystem or the filesystem they
choose have bugs).

BTW, in samba4 we added transactions to tdbs, I think this is a thing
worth back-porting in samba3 sooner or later, so the situation may
change, nevertheless a backup is always welcome (eg: passdb.tdb) to
recover from a "stupid admin failure" :-)

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce    -  idra at samba.org
Samba Team    -  http://www.samba.org
Italian Site  -  http://samba.xsec.it