[p4] Incremental backups of depot

[Ismael Arroyo]

We do checkpoints everyday, however, to perform a full backup we proffit
holydays because it takes ~3days using our Symantec software. This is
the reason we want a full backup to start with, and then only
incremental backups of depots. Our server is running over a Unix server.

The best solution we can guest using our Symantec software is make
backups over the folders of depots separately rather than doing it over
all the depot. Separatelly backups only will backup the entire folder if
there was a change. If there are not changes inside one of the folders,
then any backup will be done for that folder (because we have already a
backup with the same content).

However, I was wondering if anyone in the list uses Symantec Backup Exec
to do these backups or experience similar problems making backups of
large perforces: more than 1000 GB

Thanks for your pieces of advice :)

# ismael

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Vance [mailto:steve at vance.com] 
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 14:04
To: Ismael Arroyo
Cc: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: Re: [p4] Incremental backups of depot

I'm going to answer this broadly because there are several approaches.

First, you should be able to do incrementals. You will need to do 
checkpoints or journal truncations prior to the backup to capture your 
metadata properly. I've commonly done daily incrementals and weekly full

backups. Your problems doing incrementals are almost certainly problems 
with configuring the backup software, not with Perforce.

Some places will use a combination of journal truncation or streaming 
and something like rsync (or a comparable Windows tool if that's your 
platform) to replicate in a more real-time way to a warm failover
machine.

Some places use the snapshot filesystem features of high end filers to 
"freeze" a copy of their Perforce repository and perform their backups 
offline.

Hope this helps. There's a lot more detail depending on the approach you

choose.

Steve

Ismael Arroyo wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> - We have problems performing incremental backups with Symantec Backup
> Exec (our company software for backups).
> - We have a depot of 1.4 TB (a lot of binary sources) and we cannot
> perform frequent full backups of our depot (too much time to do this
> operation). We would like to do incremental backups (only files added
or
> eddited in the depot since latest backup) daily or weekly. However,
when
> we tried to do this with the Symantec software, the system tried to do
a
> full backup everytime.
>
> Anyone of you uses the same software to perform Perforce backups? How
do
> you do your backups in large depots? Some scripting? Just a rsync? Am
I
> asking too much?
>
> Thanks in advance :)
>
> # ismael
>
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