Best Practices for backup with 2 NAS with NFS

[Pak]

Hi all

I would like to know if it is possible and wich is the best practices to perform a backup on 2 "rotating" NFS drive

Scenario:
-One disk is attached to the network for one week to perform daily backup
-The other one is in safe place
-Once a week the customer swap the disks

I bought 2 Verbatim NAS with NFS support and I like to assign to both of them the same IP and the same NFS sharing configuration, so the customer must only swap the disks


I'd like to automate the operation, without explain to the customer all the steps into the proxmox interface (umount the old and mount the new one), cause he don't want to learn it
Obviously the "raw" system can't work, because the old disk was still mounted when the customer deattach him from the network

Some hints?
Thankyou

Paolo

 

[mlanner]

Hi,

I'm not sure you want to do it this way. Others may disagree with me. It sounds as if you're trying to mimic a tape system by rotating stuff offsite. I guess that's your whole point with the swapping the NASes in and out, to take backups offsite?

What's your incoming and outgoing bandwidth like? Would it be possible to do offsite replication between the two NASes instead? Maybe your VMs are too big and your Internet connection too slow for that?

In either case, disconnecting and reconnecting an NFS store attached to Proxmox tends to mess with the system. Sometimes I've seen the UI not load when an NFS store goes offline. Once re-attached, it works fine again, though. However, I'm afraid you might run into issues with that in the long run.

If at all possible, I would try to make really small VMs, where the OS partition can be snapshotted to one NAS and then replicated to an offsite NAS. If you have a lot of data in a data partition, I would probably just try to run Rsync on that data to the onsite NAS and then replicate that to the offsite NAS.

Does this all make sense? This way you wouldn't need to rely on humans to do their jobs properly. Humans are forgetful. And, you can easily get backup email notices that everything has run, all without connecting and disconnecting a bunch of equipment. Plus, if you need to troubleshoot anything, all the equipment is static and always in the same place.

Let me know your thoughts (and constraints).

 

[Pak]

Hi
You got the point! I wanna simulate tape backup and I've already done on other system (not proxmox) using USB disks and rsync

The NAS I'm using are really small, and really similar by dimensions to USB disks.. and also cheapest than tape device!
http://www.verbatim.it/it_10/product_gigabit-nas-external-hard-drive-1tb_50_0_18248__6816.html

If the human forget to change the disk isn't my fault, but it is if the backup system doesn't work properly...

I'd like to know if I can mount/umount the NFS share by command line using some cronjob, without mess out Proxmox

Another way I'm thinking about is to give 2 IP to the NAS and schedule the same backup job on both of them... one will fail, and one will success... but what will be the proxmox behaviour for the missing storage?

Paolo

 

[mlanner]

Hi,

I'm sure you could, technically, make a script to mount and unmount the NASes, but it would need to be integrated with Proxmox so that it's aware of the action, because the shares are mounted by Proxmox and not through other means. In the end you may end up with too much of a "hacked together" system.

I know I'm repeating myself, but I think it's with good reason; I really think you should rethink your tape-approximation strategy. NASes have their strengths and are IMHO a better solution than tape, but they are not tape and therefore shouldn't be treated as it. It also reduces the benefits of a NAS, especially in this scenario.

Because of how you attach the storage in Proxmox and how you configure the backups onto that storage, swapping out NASes the way you want to do it is not going to be an easy task.

My recommendation would be to play to the strengths of the technology components you have at hand and how they do things best. If you stray too far from that path, you run the risk of ending up with a hacked and hard to manage and maintain solution. Think automation and simplicity.

Sorry for being persistent with my suggestions. I just think the Proxmox team designed things in a certain way for a reason, and with the strengths of the chosen technologies in mind. I think they've done a good job with it. Unfortunately, the way things work in Proxmox it's simply not a good fit for how you want to set it up. That's pretty much true for any virtualization stack combined with a networked storage backend, though.

I think you have the right "ingredients." You should perhaps just rethink your implementation a bit to play to all its strengths.

 

[Pak]

Don't worry for your persistent... I'm here just to ask what could be the best practices (and if it could be possible)

I say what I like to do, but it could be different from what really I will do!!

I'd like to try to schedule the mount / umount of the NAS using Crontab, and I like to know in proxmox what will be the command to do that ... I think there is some kind of API to call...
At the end I bought those (single disk) NAS and I want use it in some way

 

[Pak]

ok... I think I'm doing it in the right way but I need help now
I "mount/umount" the NFS NAS share using pvesh command

pvesh create /storage -storage Verbatim -type nfs -export /mnt/ide1/backup -server 192.168.0.249 -path /mnt/pve/Verbatim -options vers=3 -content backup
pvesh delete /storage/Verbatim

I need help to create/remove backup's job now...

 

[Pak]

Find it...

pvesh create /cluster/backup -starttime 23:30 -all 1 -compress lzo -dow mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat,sun -mailto paolo.tezza@gmail.com -mode snapshot -quiet 1 -storage Verbatim

Let's script it all and let's see what's happen this night