[9fans] Venti off-site backups

[9fans] Venti off-site backups

[James A. Robinson]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 914 bytes --]

I see several threads about how people are cloning their Venti
servers to remote Venti servers as a means of creating a backup.

Reading over the man pages, I assume it's also possible to do
something like use rdarena to dump an arena out, encrypt it, and
put the encrypted arena into a remote service like Amazon S3.

On my Mac OS X machine I use something called Arq that can
store the data in Amazon Glacier, which is an ideal fit for true
"disaster scenario" backups (vs. day-to-day backups you might
need to access on some regular frequency).

However, I see some emails warning about using rdarena/wrarena
versus simply copying a fossil, so I'm wondering if there are issues
I'm not picking up from my reading of the man pages.  I can also
see there are various threads complaining about the stability of
venti+fossil, but then there are others saying it's stable and works
great.


Jim

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1201 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] Venti off-site backups

[Steven Stallion]

It was exactly this thought that led me to moving my venti store to
running out of plan9port. At home, I have a Linux server that provides
other services in addition to venti with an obnoxious amount of
storage. I also have a CrashPlan client running on this machine. The
result is an always-on backup that's completely hands free.

I've been a customer for about 10 years and have had to recover from
at least one disaster in that time. I've yet to have any problems with
this setup. I do not miss rotating tapes nor holding my breath any
time I needed to read an optical/spinning disk backup.

HTH,

Steve

On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 12:25 PM, James A. Robinson
<jim.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> I see several threads about how people are cloning their Venti
> servers to remote Venti servers as a means of creating a backup.
>
> Reading over the man pages, I assume it's also possible to do
> something like use rdarena to dump an arena out, encrypt it, and
> put the encrypted arena into a remote service like Amazon S3.
>
> On my Mac OS X machine I use something called Arq that can
> store the data in Amazon Glacier, which is an ideal fit for true
> "disaster scenario" backups (vs. day-to-day backups you might
> need to access on some regular frequency).
>
> However, I see some emails warning about using rdarena/wrarena
> versus simply copying a fossil, so I'm wondering if there are issues
> I'm not picking up from my reading of the man pages.  I can also
> see there are various threads complaining about the stability of
> venti+fossil, but then there are others saying it's stable and works
> great.
>
>
> Jim
>

Re: [9fans] Venti off-site backups

[Steve Simon]

i append my venti arenas to usb memory sticks - only two so far. i don't store music or videos on plan9 so compressed de-duplicated data doesn't take up much space.

the only time i had problems was my own fault, over cooling a disk through my own paranoia.

> On 26 Oct 2016, at 18:43, Steven Stallion <sstallion@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It was exactly this thought that led me to moving my venti store to
> running out of plan9port. At home, I have a Linux server that provides
> other services in addition to venti with an obnoxious amount of
> storage. I also have a CrashPlan client running on this machine. The
> result is an always-on backup that's completely hands free.
> 
> I've been a customer for about 10 years and have had to recover from
> at least one disaster in that time. I've yet to have any problems with
> this setup. I do not miss rotating tapes nor holding my breath any
> time I needed to read an optical/spinning disk backup.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> Steve
> 
> On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 12:25 PM, James A. Robinson
> <jim.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I see several threads about how people are cloning their Venti
>> servers to remote Venti servers as a means of creating a backup.
>> 
>> Reading over the man pages, I assume it's also possible to do
>> something like use rdarena to dump an arena out, encrypt it, and
>> put the encrypted arena into a remote service like Amazon S3.
>> 
>> On my Mac OS X machine I use something called Arq that can
>> store the data in Amazon Glacier, which is an ideal fit for true
>> "disaster scenario" backups (vs. day-to-day backups you might
>> need to access on some regular frequency).
>> 
>> However, I see some emails warning about using rdarena/wrarena
>> versus simply copying a fossil, so I'm wondering if there are issues
>> I'm not picking up from my reading of the man pages.  I can also
>> see there are various threads complaining about the stability of
>> venti+fossil, but then there are others saying it's stable and works
>> great.
>> 
>> 
>> Jim
>> 

Re: [9fans] Venti off-site backups

[David du Colombier]

> I see several threads about how people are cloning their Venti
> servers to remote Venti servers as a means of creating a backup.

Personally, I use three different ways of replicating the
content of my Venti file servers.

1. The first method is to use venti/mirrorarenas to replicate
the content of a Venti arena partition to another hard disk.

venti/mirrorarenas /dev/sdE0/arenas /dev/sdE1/arenas

This method requires two hard disks and two identical arena partitions.

2. The second method is to copy blocks from a Venti arena partition
to a Venti server running on another machine, accessed through the
local network.

You'll find an example of script using this method here:

http://9legacy.org/www.9legacy.org/9legacy/tools/backup/readwrite

This method requires another machine running Venti. The partition
layout could be different and the Venti servers could be running
on different operating systems.

3. The third method is to copy blocks from a Venti arena partition
to arena files, using venti/rdarena. Then you can copy the arena files
to external media like Blu-ray discs or hard disks.
The restoration is done to a running Venti using venti/wrarena.

You'll find backup and restore script examples here:

http://9legacy.org/www.9legacy.org/9legacy/tools/backup/read
http://9legacy.org/www.9legacy.org/9legacy/tools/backup/write

This method require external media to store the arena files.

For example, I use all these three methods to replicate the data
of my main file server. Consequently, the data are replicated on:

 - two machines (automatically)
 - two hard disks of each machine (automatically)
 - some external hard disks (manually)

--
David du Colombier