full-disclosure - Re: File system recursion and symlinks: A never-ending story (and how to bring it to an end for me)

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Message-ID: <20196.1306830142@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 04:22:22 -0400
From: Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu
To: coderman <coderman@...il.com>
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Re: File system recursion and symlinks: A
	never-ending story (and how to bring it to an end for me)

On Mon, 30 May 2011 18:54:01 PDT, coderman said:

> with a snapshot of a volume at 05/30/2011-18:50:30, you know the
> backup process performed on that snapshot is truly a backup of the
> data as of 05/30/2011-18:50:30 no matter how long it takes to iterate
> over / analyze the files within it.

Significant quibble:  It's a backup of the data *as it existed on the disk* as
of that timestamp.  If it's a file that's backing any production database more
complicated than the older Berkeley DBM package, it will almost certainly *not*
restore to anything usable without help from the database (either by making the
database quiesce for a moment while you snapshot, or other methods that are
able to ensure a self-consistent version is backed up).  I've seen all too many
sysadmins trying to figure out why Oracle won't come back up after restoring
the file that had the tables in it....

(And of course, the same issues apply if you're trying to do forensics on a
bad backup of a database.)

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