[haiku] Re: Backup strategy for Haiku productive systems
- From: Stephan Assmus <superstippi@xxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2010 11:09:12 +0200
On 2010-04-27 at 09:47:38 [+0200], beos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <beos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> since I wanted to start using my Haiku install for day-to-day stuff, I'd
> like to
> know what your backup
> strategy is, having Haiku's instabilities and potential filesystem bugs in
> mind.
> Would it be the best to zip the personal data and copy it to another Haiku
> partition? Or better copy it to a BeOS-generated BFS partition? To a FAT
> partition? Or should I FTP it to my desktop machine to not let Haiku's BFS
> write
> onto the backup partition directly? How often do you make backups of your
> Haiku
> data?
>
> What do you suggest, how do you do it?
>
> (Or am I overcautious? :-) )
No, the caution is justified. What may happen is that you run into a KDL and
then it doesn't matter if the BFS or other filesystem code is bug-free or
not. If stuff had not been written back to disk, then it's gone. My strategy
is to have several BFS disks across several computers (I only use Haiku, no
more BeOS runs on my machines, BFS is by far the most mature file system in
Haiku) and all my data replicated several times. Most projects I work on are
code anyways, and I frequently commit to a server. So this work is already
backed up. Incidentally, the machine hosting the WebKit/WebPositive SVN is a
Quad Core running an older Haiku revision known to be particularily stable.
The machine achieved an uptime of about a month, surviving numerous SSH
bruteforce attacks and so on. During that uptime, it did a full rebuild of
the entire WebKit and WebPositive codebase whenever I made a check-in. More
recent revisions of Haiku are IMO not as stable yet, but we are getting
there.
I guess the minimal setup would be one build host system where you have the
Haiku code, in order to upgrade easily. The host system may also be Haiku,
but could be Linux or FreeBSD. Then one Haiku boot partition that only
contains a plain Haiku installation. Then at least one Haiku partition with
all your data, which you also use for backing up settings from the boot
partition. I would use a third Haiku partition for backups. Could be on an
external disk. In my experience, the SATA disk driver is the absolutely most
reliable. I have never had an issue with that one. The ATA disk driver can
have issues, but I have not narrowed it down yet. You can tell which one is
in use: /dev/disk/scsi/... -> SATA, /dev/disk/ata/... -> ATA driver. Using
external disks attached via USB usually works, but again I've seen have
issues in the past.
Best regards,
-Stephan
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