[Box Backup] How to do off-site backup

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Sune,

On Tue, 24 Jan 2012, Sune Mølgaard wrote:

> I use bb to backup a number of machines to my server, but I would like 
> to keep a copy of the backup data off-site, and I'm thinking that such 
> an off-laoding could break if said backup runs while a client is backing 
> up to the server.
>
> One option would be a script that shuts down bbstored, runs the 
> off-loading, and then starts bbstored again, but that would probably 
> prompt the clients to send mails about failed backups, which I don't 
> want.
>
> Thus, my question is, how do I institute a proper scheme to off-load 
> bbstored data to an off-site location?

rsync will work. Ideally you would copy from a read-only snapshot of the 
store server's data directory, which you can create using LVM, XFS or BSD 
UFS, but even if you can't do that, the only real damage is likely to be 
that the most recently modified files are not restorable from the second 
server, perhaps because:

1. their data is not there; or

2. their data is partially uploaded, leaving them corrupt; or

3. the directory containing them was not updated so they're not visible in 
directory listings.

1 and 3 can be fixed by running "bbstoreaccounts check fix" on the offsite 
backup server before restoring from it; for 2 you can just restore an 
older copy of that file (and it's probably only 1 file per account).

Cheers, Chris.
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