Dangerous!? vzdump standard backup rotatation

_Lars_

Well-Known Member
Jan 11, 2012
45
2
48
I had configured a new backup task and was checking its status. The logfile states

INFO: adding '/dev/virt_store_sas/vm-102-disk-1' to archive ('vm-disk-virtio0.raw')
INFO: Total bytes written: 42945620480 (11.95 MiB/s)
INFO: archive file size: 22.41GB
INFO: delete old backup '/mnt/pve/backup01/dump/vzdump-qemu-102-2012_01_29-23_55_08.tar'
INFO: Finished Backup of VM 102 (00:57:31)
INFO: Backup job finished successfully

Oops, "delete old backup"??? (unfortunatly I didn't remove the previous
backup from the default 'dump' dir)?
Deleting old files by default is IMHO very bad idea. I'm very new to proxmox
and had no contact with it before 2.0 Beta. So i'm not familiar with usual
do's and don'ts.

The the only lines of any kind of rotation man is mentioning are

| -maxfiles integer (1 - N)
|
| Maximal number of backup files per VM.

and

| BACKUP FILE NAMES
| Newer version of vzdump encodes the virtual machine type and the
| backup time into the filename, for example
|
| vzdump-openvz-105-2009_10_09-11_04_43.tar
|
| That way it is possible to store several backup into the same
| directory. The parameter "maxfiles" can be used to specify the
|
maximal number of backups to keep.

So from reading this did not expect that only one level of backups is kept by
default. Maybe it's only me but I think this is a pitfall. At least it happens to
me that I lost backups.

My suggestion:

The default should be: *NO* rotation if '-maxfiles' is not specified explicitly.
The manual should also be more clarifying on this.


Lars
 
IMHO, the dangerous part is that you do not test and verify your backups system.
Besides, you should always move your backup to some kind of offline storage (tape).

Don't get me wrong - the dangerous part is writing man pages without mentioning
any kind of deletion as default setting.

Besides, my point is not the backup as I'm just testing things, the point is writing
clear manuals and making *SAVE* default settings.
 
there are arguments for your suggestions but there are also strong arguments against it. the strongest is probably that vzdump works this way since more than 4 years, so I do not think that we should change anything here.

docs can always be better but I do not see anything real wrong - feel free to add you comments in the wiki, e.g. here: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/VZDump
 

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