MySQL backups

[Ben Scott]

On 10/15/07, Thomas Charron <twaffle at gmail.com> wrote:
>   They intend to use some kinda of 'CA Agent for Open Files', which
> makes me cringe even more.

  "Open file agents" (OFA) are often useful on MS Windows, where files
are frequently under mandatory locks.  There's no advisory file
locking under Windows (that I know of), so all locks are mandatory,
and further, file locking is a lot more common.  For example, Excel
locks spreadsheet files when you open them (to prevent access
collisions).  But then people leave their Excel files open overnight
and you can't back them up.  An OFA will solve that problem.  This is
generally safe, because Excel only writes to the file when you hit
"Save" (so the file is consistent on disk, despite being open and
locked).  Most OFAs are nothing special; they're just a way for the
backup software company to extract more money from the customer.

  On *nix, file locks are almost always advisory, and are much less
common in the first place.  So an "open file agent" is practically a
NOOP; you can almost always just back-up open files.  But I'm sure CA
will be happy to sell you a license for it anyway.

  Open file agents do *nothing* to address problems due to files on
disk being in an inconsistent state when the backup runs.  With MS
Excel or whatever, this isn't an issue.  Not so with a database.

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

  Well, for MySQL, just do database-to-disk dumps and back those files
up, like I said.

  I don't really know much about CVS from an admin POV, so I can't
comment there.  Is there a way to make a transactional copy of an
entire CVS repository?

-- Ben