Re: backing up fsfs repo

On Wed, 2006-07-05 at 09:24 -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

> >> Can anybody tell me what the implications of just doing a normal backup
> >> (unix dump or tar of flat file structure) of an fsfs repo might be? Is it
> >> safe, or should I still be using "svnadmin dump"?
> >
> > IMHO, yes, because it is The Documented Way(tm) to make backups.
>
> It's a slight bit risky, because if files are being written while being
> tarballed, you may wind up with an incomplete change recorded on the last
> last commit operation. FSFS seems much better about this than BDB, though.

What would happen if the server crashed with that incomplete change
in progress? Is there a way to recover, and if so would it also
work to fix a backup snapshot that happened to hit that state?

> I'd personally suggest using hot-packup-py to make a clean backup, and
> backing up that. In case anyone uses the system while you're in the midst of
> doing the backup, it's handy to have a good clean snapshot like that. You
> might not have the last commit recorded, but it seems much safer.

When you run many applications on a server it is kind of annoying to
have to dedicate special operations and duplicate space for each one
just to back it up. Shouldn't it be able to recover from any state
that you happen to copy?

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell@gmail.com
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