[oclug] NFS mount question

[David F. Skoll]

On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, Lafleur Maurice wrote:

> in order to make a tape back up of a machine [A], I need to be able to mount
> its root FS onto the server that has the backup unit installed [B].

No, you don't.  You need to listen to the SSH talk tomorrow. :-)

I do backups as follows: The machine with the tape drive has a monster
disk, big enough to store everything that needs to be backed up.  My
backup script first uses "rsync" over SSH to mirror the machines to be
backed up, and then writes everything to tape.

Advantages:

1) Security.  The transport mechanism is SSH.
2) Speed.  Rsync is extremely efficient.  And writing to tape from a local
hard drive lets you keep it streaming.
3) Ease of restoring.  In 99% of the cases, the tape never even needs to be
used.  You can just pull the file off the disk mirror.

Disadvantage:

1) You need a monster disk on the machine with the tape drive.  This is not
a big problem, because monster disks are pretty cheap.

--
David.