vzdump omits /var/log

[tog]

To test my vzdump-generated backups I took my latest backup from a couple of hours ago and restored it to a new CTID.

I shut down the good working CTID and started up the restored CTID (so I didn't have an IP conflict) and things were missing from the restored copy.

/var/log/postgresql was empty and had the wrong permissions so pgsql didn't start... when I fixed the permissions so it would start, I noticed that I simply had no pgsql database at all which should have been in /var/lib/postgresql/8.1/main.

This doesn't seem like a very useful backup, if I had a hardware failure and had relied on these vzdump backups I'd be screwed.

 

[tog]

Ok, wait a minute, I restarted the restored CTID and postgres came up and I seem to have my data. I confirmed all the same stuff from /var/lib/vz/private/[goodctid] seemed to be there in /var/lib/vz/private/[restoredctid]

/var/log/* inside the VZ container seems to be the only thing missing from the restored CTID?

 

[tog]

All right, I guess this is on purpose, so it's expected that I do not have anything from /var/log/*

From /usr/bin/vzdump:

find_add_exclude ('-files', '/var/log/.+');

Postgres started up once I fixed its log permissions and so did apache and the application inside the VZ container seems to work.

 

[tog]

Some admin should change the title of this thread to "vzdump omits /var/log" so it's a little less alarming.

 

[dietmar]

Done.

Omitting the logs usually saves much space, but maybe this should not be the default?

- Dietmar

 

[dietmar]

Any idea why you got wrong permissions?

- Dietmar

 

[tog]

I got wrong permissions at first because /var/log/* was omitted from the backup. The directory for postgres's logs is a subdirectory underneath /var/log/ which needs its permissions manually fixed when you first (re)create it so the postgres user can write to the directory.

IMHO, I think the omission of /var/log/* from the vzdump backups shouldn't be default, but is still of value should be turned into a command line option. There are some instances where some people might be expecting absolutely everything to be there when they restore and might actually have something in /var/log/ that was more important than normal, so they'd be unpleasantly surprised.