On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 6:32 AM, Timmy Siu <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear ALL SL users:
> Why do you bother spending your precious life time on writing programming?
>
> Physicist should "use" programme, not write programme.   ;)

This is insulting. A smiley does not fix it. I'm not a physicist, but
I've worked in research and industry. I solve problems, and get paid
for it. Robust backup systems are an ongoing problem, and needs
change.

> Use this for MySQL backup, a complete FREE enterprise solution:
> http://www.zmanda.com/backup-mysql.html

I like the Amanda software. It's powerful, flexible, and I personally
wrote the SunOS port of it, and wrote the old Exabyte 2.3 Gig specs
for it, and worked with its MySQL features then.  Zmanda seems to be
doing good work, and I actually did some RHEL/CentOS 4 work with
Zmanda, which seems to be competently rebundling it for commercial
grade support.

You see, some of us in various science and business fields actually
need features that are not built into those tools. For example, for
MySQL backup, there's a problem of having to do a regular dump of the
databases and use *that* for backup and recovery., rather than being
able to simply image the filesystem as the built-in "tar" based tools
of Amanda provide. *THAT* is a lengthy and grotesquely inefficient
process, especially for a large database.

What works better? Installing MySQL on an LVM filesystem, locking the
database for a few seconds to get the last atomic operations committed
as part of a nightly scheduled service pause, making an LVM snapshot,
and using Amanda to backup the snapshot. But that's a more
sophisticated approach and requires fairly sophisticated system
management, which *is not* easily integrated into Zmanda's write-up.
Alternatie, one can set up a master/master setup (refered to as MMM,
look it up), and perform the Amanda backup against the nominally
secondary master. But that's not built into the Zmanda published
toolkits.

This is one reason why people who actually need to run the systems for
physicists, doctors, lawyers, or non-profiits write freeware: to have
access to the components, solve the real problemss, and be able to do
it completely and well. After all, where did Zmanda's products come
from? They're a repackaged "AMANDA", the University of Maryland
published backup system.