So... Is Enworld doing okay?

[Nightfall]

Hey better the illusion than the real thing!

 

[drothgery]

Yeah, but how much do they cost?

Not much (it doesn't take very long to say, burn 2 GB to a DVD, which takes a <$1 DVD-R for each backup and a <$50 burner; tapes are faster, and hard drives faster still). The bottleneck with backups seems to be downloading the backup files for storage off-site ( which apparently takes TwinRose 20 hrs for 2 GB -- which means either ENWorld or TwinRose's ISP has bandwidth issues; it shouldn't take 20 hrs to download 2 GB on any broadband service worthy of the name ); if the backup device is local to ENWorld's servers, it's nowhere near as time consuming to make a backup.

Disclaimer: I'm not a sysadmin, don't play one on TV, and didn't stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night...

 

[Nightfall]

Drog,

If you did I'd want your room then.

 

[Nyaricus]

*likes to allow Nightfall the illusion of power... *

*likes to laugh at Nightfall*

 

[Nightfall]

Eh I don't mind being laughed it. As long as I'm going for the joke. Which I am, of course.

 

[IronWolf]

Do you have any idea how much lag that would create? I'd hazard a guess that backing up this site would take a good 16+ hours of good solid lag-time.

It shouldn't take near that long. I don't know the exact size of the DB and can only guess from posts I have seen from Twin Rose and Spoony back in the day, but dumping the DB shouldn't take 16 hours. While it is being backed up will the server slow down while it churns through the data? Yep. But it can be scheduled to occur at a time the server has a lesser load than it may have at other times. And even then, it is a small price to pay for having backups to restore from.

 

[Michael Morris]

There's two ways to backup the database. 1st (and the way I suspect chris is doing it) is mysqldump - which is slower than dog doo doo. I abandoned that a long time ago in favor of mysqlhotcopy - which takes about 7 1/2 minutes to make a backup.

 

[BSF]

There's two ways to backup the database. 1st (and the way I suspect chris is doing it) is mysqldump - which is slower than dog doo doo. I abandoned that a long time ago in favor of mysqlhotcopy - which takes about 7 1/2 minutes to make a backup.

Now that's hunky dory! Hmm, can you actually run that without bringing down the boards too? Mostly just wondering if it would be feasible to drop some scripts together on the server. Maybe a perl or python script? Heck, even just a shell script. Schedule it in cron to dump the database to a seperate disk location. Maybe even gzip it up to make is smaller. (Assuming the server has the resources to successfully compress it.)

For that matter, you could script it to shutdown the boards and restart them when it is finished. That might be a little more tricky, but it is feasible.

 

[Michael Morris]

No - Mysqlhotcopy locks and flushes the tables before it runs. It doesn't run any queries - it physically copies the data files out of the mysql directory and into the backup location.

 

[BOZ]

i could see why the 7 1/2 minute deal would be more appealing than the 20-hour deal.