[Lustre-discuss] MDT move aka backup w rsync

[Thomas Roth]

Andreas Dilger wrote:
> On Jul 15, 2009  18:35 +0200, Thomas Roth wrote:
>>...
>> The traditional backup method of getting the EAs and tar-ing the MDT
>> doesn't finish in finite time. It did before, and the filesystem has
>> since grown by a mere 40GB of data, so it shouldn't take that much
>> longer - certainly another indication that there is something wrong.
>> Of course I have yet to see whether "rsync -Xav" does much better on the
>> full system ;-)
>>
>> The system runs Debian Etch, kernel 2.6.22, Lustre 1.6.7.1
> 
> Direct MDT backup has a problem in 1.6.7.1 due to the addition of the
> file size on the MDT inodes.  If you do "--sparse" backups this should
> avoid the slowdown.  You could also try the "dump" program, which can
> avoid reading the data from sparse files entirely.

Is this behavior changed in 1.6.7.2?  But the size information is still
there in the inodes, isn't it?
Anyhow our backup script already runs tar with the "--sparse" option.

Regards, Thomas