Help me make backups better on GNU/Linux

[Gordon Messmer]

On 03/19/2013 04:22 AM, Neal Becker wrote:
> check out obnam.  I'm very pleased with it.

That's not at all the same thing.

You cannot back up files in active use safely.  If you have a SQL 
server, for instance, you need to either shut it down or quiesce the 
data files for the entire duration of the backup.  On production 
systems, that creates an outage that's unacceptable.

While GNU/Linux systems support making a snapshot of their filesystems 
in order to reduce the duration of any outage, there is no standard 
infrastructure to do so, and no integration with the services that need 
to make their data consistent for backup.  That is what I'm hoping to 
provide.

By including a standard snapshot infrastructure, you can back up a 
system safely and servers only need to quiesce their data for a moment, 
while the snapshot is made, rather than the full duration of the backup.