[Server-devel] Backup of user home

[Martin Langhoff]

Hi Rodolfo,

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 9:26 PM, Rodolfo D. <rodolfo.arce.s at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm working on a backup and restore feature for our schoolservers, and I got
> stuck on home directories of laptops

Interesting task. You aren't telling us much about your setup --
specifically, how is the network conn between your XSs and your backup
server?

> The backup works like this.. based on the backup script provided by dsd, and
> also based on our specific features.. I placed all important data in a
> directory "/library/backup" (wich can later be tar, ziped, and in our case
> rsync-ed), and its being done by a cron job

Ok, so are you using dsd's script, or a modified version of it? If you
are using dsd's script unmodified, it sounds like your are getting 2
copies of the 'users' dir.

> On a centralized backup server.. we have a script that PULLS the
> /library/backup of each server, so main configs are being saved without much
> hassle.. But when it comes to user directories, it lack permissions, because
> the /library/users/SN directory has no read permissions for others
>
> how would you recomend that we do this?

Ok, so the backup server connects to each XS via ssh+rsync, right?

My recommendations are as follows:

 - Make sure you are doign things in an rsync-smart way. For example:
don't rsync a tar.gz of the users' directory

 - Given that you are running your rsync from the backup server, it
will be easy to run it under fakeroot. Look at the fakeroot manpage,
you'll find that it can keep its metadata. With that, you'll preserve
metadata (owner/grp, acls, etc) without needing to be root.

hth,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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