[389-users] db2bak.pl error with changelogdb

[Michael Gettes]

this kinda brings up a long-standing question in my mind… what’s the “best” way to back things up?

ok, let’s agree we need to know more about what’s the problem we are trying to solve.  For me, i’d like
to keep this somewhat generic to hopefully make this a useful discussion.  Assuming multiple ldap servers
the idea is to get a useful backup of the data in userRoot without much overhead and using a relatively
safe mechanism.  I’ll exclude definitions about time to restore and such.

The db2bak strategy worries me cuz you’re backing up the db files and the time it takes to back those up
on a reasonable sized ldap store is non-trivial.  So, is there not a bit of worry about indices being out of
sync with the entry store itself along with the log files managing the changes?  one would have to filesystem
snapshot the DB itself to get a sane backup of a production service, yes?

db2ldif gets you the text dump of the DB.  it is my understanding, at an object level, this gets you a reliable
backup of each entry although data throughout the store may be inconsistent while the large file is being written.
i can tell you i do this regularly and it seems to work well, but i wonder about what risks i am incurring with this
strategy besides what i already noted.

of course, you can have yet another ldap server lying around not being used by apps and it’s purpose is to dump
the store periodically, but that may not be part of you what want to achieve with disparate locations and such.

other strategies?  yes, i have read the docs but i figured i would get a bit more practical by asking the question
to possibly learn more about what others are actually doing.

/mrg