Hi there,
After evaluating a lot of backup solutions my employee, a small company,
all of them very too expensive, I was wondering about the effort to
emulate the workings of a "modern" backup solution using free software
tools under Fedora Linux, CentOS and RHEL.
We already have a few TB on file shares (Samba) and mailboxes (Zimba)
and just moving those bits around for our weekly full backup is proving
to be too slow for our Gb network and impossible for the hosted machines
we use as contingency and off-site backup . Beisdes, incremental backups
are taking a too long time just scanning the file systems searching for
changed files.
It looks Commvault, EMC, Symantec, etc are focusing block-level backups:
copy used disk blocks for full backups and changed disk blocks for
incremental ones. It looks they can get this information from many
storage appliances, hypervisors and server OSes, but most focus on
Windows Server, Exchange, Oracle, Sharepoint and big bucks storage
appliances. Some of then talk about "continuous, forever incremental".
We even have a few Windows servers, a small Oracle Standard database,
and are evaluating am entry level storage, but for now one the big
problem are our Linux file and mail servers and all proposals from
vendors loooks like overfeatured and overpriced.
We already evaluated Amanda and Bacula. Setup looks too complicated,
managing and monitoring looks low-level (the boss wants some dashboard
like we already have from Zabbix). But worse, it looks like they will
have the same problems as our current backup scripts based on tar, gzip,
scp and rsync.
Sory for the long story, the question: could I implement block-level
backups using dump, dd, and some LVM or ext utility? Maybe using
inotify? Why no open source backup tool seems to be doing this?
Would any option allow me to restore an individual file? (I guess we can
live with restoring entire file systems, it's just a matter of
segregating a few file trees instead of having everything on the same
logical volume.)
And maybe there is some open source solution or help to implement file
archiving (moving old/unused files to a different volume so I can't
forget about then on the daily backup).
[]s, Fernando Lozano
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