Comments on: Incremental rsync

By: Using Rsync as a Backup Solution

Using Rsync as a Backup Solution — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 05:58:37 +0000

[...] separate backup files for each backup instance. For something like this, you might consider using irsync for point-in-time incremental [...]

By: bhanu

bhanu — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:54:25 +0000

i want to have just mysql “hotcopy” backups what command to use ? can we make it to run by cron ?

By: Valics Lehel

Valics Lehel — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 11:57:54 +0000

How to use FTP instead of SSH to remote backup?
Also how to use a public key to SSH to an another server?

By: JK

JK — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:50:13 +0000

Seems to be a problem with mysqldumps. I have set this..

mysql_hotcopy=0
mysql_dump=1
mysql_dump_gz=1

Now I expected to get a full set of dumps in each daily snapshot but instead I get nothing at all there.. only in ‘full’ is the latest set of dumps. Regular files/dirs as listed in paths.irsync do appear as expected in snapshots and full.

Any way to fix this? Really do need daily mysqldump backups.

Also the ‘mysql-only’ flag doesn’t work..

/usr/local/irsync/irsync –remote –mysql-only
..
Performing remote backup: ssh: –mysql-only: Name or service not known

This way also..

/usr/local/irsync/irsync -rm
..
error: one of –local or –remote must be declared, see –help

By: Rodney Giles

Rodney Giles — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 18:08:48 +0000

The issue I continue to see when the Server itself phones to the backup server. If the Server itself it hacked, the hacker will then have access to the backups and those are compromised.

By: Bjørn Langfors

Bjørn Langfors — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 01:55:27 +0000

First off, thanks for a simple, elegant and flexible a backup solution.

However, I recently found that the snaps-directory was empty even though the script had been running every night. This turned to be because the mtime on the full-directory had not changed since it was originally created so the find-command that did the cleanup ended up wiping everything after the first 14 days had elapsed.

Adding “touch -m $backup_storage/$lohost.full” before the find command seems to fix the problem.

As far as I can tell the mtime of a directory will only be updated if its contents are changed (ie. files and/or directories added or deleted). Since I’m just backing up a bunch of directories, the contents of the full-directory doesn’t change between rsyncs (only the contents of the directories within it does) so the mtime doesn’t update.

This is on a Linux box with ext3 filesystems.

Hope this helps!

By: Ryan M.

Ryan M. — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 15:15:06 +0000

In theory yes that is easily done with ssh keys however in practice you would be creating allot more work than is needed, having servers “phone-home” if you will, to the backup server, is allot less tedious to setup in the long run. You may also run into issues with the backup server properly retrieving backups from the servers if you are not SCP/FTP’ing into the server as root to copy the backups, as there are allot of backed up files that will have root level permissions.

By: Rodney Giles

Rodney Giles — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 21:11:24 +0000

Ryan,

Would it be possible to reverse the way this runs and have a backup server that polls each server and downloads the backups that way? Rather than the actual host sending to the backup?

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:52:49 +0000

I might be missing something, but where can I see some examples of the paths/exclude files? Can you pattern match? For example, excluding *.tar.gz

By: dt

dt — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:11:23 +0000

I don’t fully understand how you make incremental backup for innodb databases (because hotcopy is only for MyISAM). I found a script that also backup innodb databases and is compatible with MySQL:
http://www.percona.com/software/percona-xtrabackup/

What do you think, it may be integrated in irsync?

By: Ryan M.

Ryan M. — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:23:28 +0000

The full seed (servername.full) is only created once, subsequent runs sync only changes into the servername.full path. So, you will always see rsync running against the servername.full path but it is still only syncing in the new/changed data to the path. The .snaps folders are created off the .full path with hardlinks, when data is synced into the .full path, changed/new files will break/create new hardlinks, leaving unique snapshots behind for each respective date.

By: Adrian

Adrian — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:17:10 +0000

Is there a way to exclude having a seed for all the subsequent backups ? rysnc-ing only the changes after the initial seed ?

By: IRSYNC & Passwordless SSH Keys | R-fx Networks

IRSYNC & Passwordless SSH Keys | R-fx Networks — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:54:39 +0000

[...] the case of my recently released project Incremental Rsync (IRSYNC), one of the implementation hurdles was to have servers backup using a secure medium. This easily [...]