mksnap_ffs woes

[Francisco Reyes]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Andrea Venturoli wrote:

> Replacing the software would mean replacing the hardware (not only the PCs, 
> but the attached machines too) at multiple sites, which would mean a HUGE 
> amount of money; that's behind my power and is to be considered out of 
> question.

Not necessarily true. How about a web application?
This would mean that the machines would only need to be able to run a web 
browser. IF they are very old you could install FreeBSD on them. Even a 
200MHZ machine can run FreeBSD semi decently with X on it.

> It's some bunch of DBFs with associated indexes


If you give me the extensions I can take a reasonable guess at what they 
are. You CAN copy them. You just need to write a simple program to open 
them and copy them. Should be near trivial once you have whatever they 
used.

> Given the clients need to be up 24/7, I though of filesystem snapshots as the 
> only solution.

With DBFs that won't work.
You will very likely have corrupted headers if you do a copy/sync/snapshot 
depending on how busy your system is and how often writes are done to it.

> I'll keep trying a bit more, since it seems doing them on a daily schedule 
> doesn't do any harm. The problems so far have only arisen when I manually 
> started a backup script (possibly interrupting it, cleaning up, and starting 
> again).

And you say this system is 24/7? DBFs are not exactly very good at this.. 
specially if you have many deletes. Is this mostly a read only or write 
once only type of system?

> P.S. The firm who sold that crap, also implemented the file server before 
> mine; just without any RAID and/or backup facility. These data are vital to 
> that business.

Many times it's a matter of how much a client wants to pay. On the 
last server I setup given the option of getting a RAID controller (IDE) 
for under $200 the client said no. You can only educate and advice a 
client so much if they are not willing to listen. The cost of unforseen 
crashes is usually far off in a small business owner's mind.

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