- I've read earlier you are using BackupPC. For a few hosts it's working well for us. Did you not find this tool sufficient, having to look for alternatives (besides the ability of partial updates with other mentioned BU tools)?

- Have you ever thought of using tapes? The equipment is relatively expensive, but tapes are relatively cheap. And no worries of many files and hardlinks. There are worries of other issues, of course. But with that many hosts you're dealing with daily, I'd consider using them...

- Have you thought of using agent-based backups? Many of them can solve the ever-increasing monolithic file backup problems too (well, some of it, most particular being the backup of various database files on MS hosts and Outlook PST files, etc). There are free tools to choose from, too, like A(Z?)manda, Bacula, etc.

- I'm also wondering why you like to backup database files as-is (being one of your primary reasons looking for diffing backup tools). A database datafile or tablespace file might not be in sync with disk contents (TBH on even a moderately intensive workload, it never is), so it's practically impossible to create a consistent, working copy. A mechanism should be used that either syncs/locks database files during backup (which in turn causes a stall in DB access), or other methods should be considered, IMO, like dumping consistent backups of the DB in question, and backing up that dump. Or use facilities that are meant for consistent offline backups, like the binary logs of MySQL, etc.

- I've noticed you have changed your VPS infrastructure to VMWare some time ago (what were your company using before that btw?), do you have any recommendations to look for when doing incremental backups of VMs? We too plan on providing some VPS solution, the most probable solution we'll provide is OpenVZ and/or KVM-based virtualization. The latter uses images similar to VMWare.

- chris
(Return to parent message)