Traditional Unix backup strategies for OS X
I run a Unix shop with a large number of Sparcstations running Solaris- and two Macs running OS X.
My backup strategy is quite simple and robust for the Solaris machines. Each machine is represented by a subdirectory on a single centralized dedicated backup drive, which contains further subdirectories for Mon-Sat, Week1-Week5, and Monthly. Under cron, each night a level 7 ufsdump is run to put the incremental data into its nightly folder, every Sunday night a level 5 is done into the appropriate weekly folder, and once a month a full level 0 dump is done into the appropriate monthly folder. And after all the monthlies are done, the backup drive gets automatically duped onto an online hot spare, and the newly-duped copy gets manually taken offline and physically swapped through my safe deposit box: keeping a full set of everything available online at all times as well as offsite for disaster prevention. This methodology has paid for itself several times over, over the years.
This has proven to be reliable and bulletproof, as well as fully automated: this is how I want to do business. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any good way to fit the Macs into this structure, since all indications are that the dump utility provided in OS X is intrinsically broken and does not handle the strangenesses of the Apple filesystem.
Are there any plans, either at Apple or in the opensource world, to implement proper dump functionality so that these Unix boxes can be fit in to existing, longstanding Unix backup strategies? I've looked at all the Mac "backup" utilities, and none of them seem to understand that simply snapshotting a filesystem is not enough: incremental restore may be critical in case of issues that go undetected for a few days or weeks. They may have nice pretty GUIs, but they don't do what is really needed, which is to provide a controllable combination of snapshot and incremental functionality. For a 20+ year Unix geek who has no fear of CLI tools and reading man pages, this is extremely frustrating...
Does anybody out there have good old cron-based dump/ufsdump for these machines, with no blinky GUI or excess bells and whistles, working? Or at least something that smells enough like a proper dump strategy that a dinosaur like me would be willing to use it? It seems sad to have Unix boxes that have omitted these most basic Unix utilities...
My backup strategy is quite simple and robust for the Solaris machines. Each machine is represented by a subdirectory on a single centralized dedicated backup drive, which contains further subdirectories for Mon-Sat, Week1-Week5, and Monthly. Under cron, each night a level 7 ufsdump is run to put the incremental data into its nightly folder, every Sunday night a level 5 is done into the appropriate weekly folder, and once a month a full level 0 dump is done into the appropriate monthly folder. And after all the monthlies are done, the backup drive gets automatically duped onto an online hot spare, and the newly-duped copy gets manually taken offline and physically swapped through my safe deposit box: keeping a full set of everything available online at all times as well as offsite for disaster prevention. This methodology has paid for itself several times over, over the years.
This has proven to be reliable and bulletproof, as well as fully automated: this is how I want to do business. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any good way to fit the Macs into this structure, since all indications are that the dump utility provided in OS X is intrinsically broken and does not handle the strangenesses of the Apple filesystem.
Are there any plans, either at Apple or in the opensource world, to implement proper dump functionality so that these Unix boxes can be fit in to existing, longstanding Unix backup strategies? I've looked at all the Mac "backup" utilities, and none of them seem to understand that simply snapshotting a filesystem is not enough: incremental restore may be critical in case of issues that go undetected for a few days or weeks. They may have nice pretty GUIs, but they don't do what is really needed, which is to provide a controllable combination of snapshot and incremental functionality. For a 20+ year Unix geek who has no fear of CLI tools and reading man pages, this is extremely frustrating...
Does anybody out there have good old cron-based dump/ufsdump for these machines, with no blinky GUI or excess bells and whistles, working? Or at least something that smells enough like a proper dump strategy that a dinosaur like me would be willing to use it? It seems sad to have Unix boxes that have omitted these most basic Unix utilities...
