MySQL backups

[Thomas Charron]

On 10/15/07, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/15/07, Thomas Charron <twaffle at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Has anyone had experience with using CA backup solutions backing up
> > CVS and MySQL data repositories?
>   CA as in ARCServe?  Ewww.   Horrible software.  Run, do not walk,
> away from that crap.

  I truely, true wish I had some say in it, but yes, it is, and
unfortunately, I'm on a boat (our server) in their IT ocean.

> >   It really concerns me that our Sysadmins are planning to do this, as
> > they don't want to take down the MySQL or CVS servers while they do a
> > backup.
>   Just about anything that keeps its files open all the time is *NOT*
> going to work well for this.  Upon a restore, best case, it will seem
> to the software as if the machine lost power at the time of the
> backup.  The "best case", because a backup isn't instantaneous, and so
> different parts of different files will get backed up at different
> times.  Such a situation may not be recoverable.

  They intend to use some kinda of 'CA Agent for Open Files', which
makes me cringe even more.

>   With database servers, there are typically two approaches to solving
> this problem.  One is to have the database server do a
> dump/export/whatever to disk file(s) before the backup runs, and then
> just backup those files.  Essentially a two-stage backup.  Not
> sophisticated, but often reliable.  The other approach is to have
> special backup software that can speak to the running database server
> and suck the data out in a backup-ish way.  In the payware world, such
> software is often called an "agent" (as in, "Oracle agent", "Sybase
> agent", etc.).  Such don't need the disk space for the extra files,
> and may have other benefits.

  That was our suggestion.  But they insist it HAS to be done without
taking any services available on the system down.  Specifically, for
CVS, this CANNOT be done.

-- 
-- Thomas