Some so-called “Green” harddisks don’t like being in a RAID array. These are primarily SATA drives, and they gain their green credentials by being able reduce their RPM when not in use, as well as other aggressive power management trickery. That’s all cool and in a way desirable – we want our hardware to use [...]
A user on a linux user group mailing list asked about this, and I was one of the people replying. Re-posting here as I reckon it’s of wider interest. > [...] tens of gigs of data in MySQL databases. > Some in memory tables, some MyISAM, a fair bit InnoDB. According to my > understanding, [...]
rsnapshot is a filesystem snapshot utility for making backups of local and remote systems, based on rsync. Rather than just doing a complete copy every time, it uses hardlinks to create incrementals (which are from a local perspective a full backup also). You can specify how long to keep old backups, and all the other [...]
Do you know if your production MySQL servers will come back up when restarted? A recent support episode illustrates a number of best practices.
In today’s gp/bp an open door will be kicked in: take your backups offsite! I was actually tempted to create a poll to see how many of you do not have proper backups, and how many of you do not take those backups offsite. It is a simple piece of advice and relatively simple to [...]
Since writing and speaking a bit more about the “relax! a failure is not an emergency” concept, more and more people approach me with interesting horror stories. I’m scribbling a few backup-related ones here for your enjoyment – and naturally there are important lessons. Story 1: A place makes backups that get shipped off-site, interstate [...]