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Rwky
Asked: 2016-05-10 07:42:08 +0800 CST

What's the safest way to backup a graphite whisper database?

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What's the safest way to backup a graphite whisper database, is it safe to just use tar or is there another method required to prevent corruption?

backup linux graphite

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There are a few options for backing up databases like this, and assuming there's an easy mechanism to ensure consistency (temporarily halting the database/locking write access, etc), they're all roughly similar.

    The key thing (as Craig Estey mentions in his comment) is to use some mechanism to ensure what you write is consistent. There's not point backing up a database if you're going to get junk!

    I did find this link from Swift that shows how they leveraged LD_PRELOAD and flock() to lock the Whisper files and back up the databases in a consistent state. Looks like they also open sourced the code!

    In general for backing up stuff like this though:

    Tar it up

    Pros:

    • Simple
    • Portable
    • No additional tools required
    • Compression rate is flexible (xz, gzip, bz2)

    Cons:

    • Potentially slow
    • Incremental backups are possible but a bit of a faff

    Rsync it

    Pros:

    • Also simple
    • Fast
    • Incremental backups are easy
    • Compression in transit

    Cons:

    • Uses SSH so if you're not copying to a remote server might be slower than other tools
    • Compression not available at end without using tar/gzip etc.

    Filesystem Snapshots

    Pros:

    • Almost instant
    • Simple
    • Probably space efficient?

    Cons:

    • Requires setting up the drives with LVM/similar
    • Not as simple as other solutions.
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