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We're looking to implement snapshots as a on site/online backup to provide shorter restore windows.
Thus we would like to have a snap taken at say 2:00 AM and another one at 12:00 daily along with a weekly snap.
How do I go about this? Do I need to allocate a snap volume for each day of the week and each time slot?
I'm trying to wrap my head around the start and stop times for the snap schedule. I'm just looking for a read-only point in time of the volume.
Thanks much,
Ryan
Create your Snapshoot in Volume Manager.
Assign the Snapshot to the Logical Volume
Create Snapshot share then create share and place in Snapshot share (if Read only set in nas resources"SMB function").
• Create a new share that will be assigned to previous activated snapshot,
• Go to menu CONFIGURATION -> NAS resources, In function Create new share:, enter share name,
• Use option Specified path and select snapshot that you want to have access to,
• Click on apply button to create a share.
• Now you can start to explore your share (snapshot) using specified network
protocol.
Then create your Snapshot task for your times and day settings.
Location MAINTENANCE -> snapshot -> Snapshots -> [snapshot_name] -> Function:
Note
Please be reasonable, when you are calculating the space reserved for snapshots. Please set as snapshot size as much space as you expect to change during active snapshot. E.g. when you are doing backup from snapshot which takes one hour please set this snapshot size to as much space that will be changed during one hour. The snapshot will become inactive if the content (data changed on Logical Volume) exceeds the snapshot capacity. You do not lose data in that case, just the dataset, which is virtual for the users at the moment, will be written to the data volume. The old dataset, which has been frozen with the snapshot, is not available any longer.
When you define the schedule, use only as many snapshots in the same time as really needed. A large count of active snapshots can slow down the system considerably.
Manual creating and removing of snapshots can be done in the CONFIGURATION -> volume manager -> vg[nr] -> Function: Volume Manager.
Thanks for the response. I appologize. I should have been more clear.
I'm doing snapshots of iSCSI LUNs for VMWare. I have figured out how to create a snapshot and schedule the one snapshot. I have also figured out how to make the snapshotted LUN available in VMWare to mount and restore individual files from it. This part is excellent.
What I need to know is if it is possible *using the same snapshot volume* to create multiple snapshots back in time on a hourly, daily, weekly basis. Or do I need to create a snapshot volume for each snapshot I would like to take?
Is there a good way to estimate how much data will change when considering how big to make the snapshot volumes?
It seems that the open-e snapshot system is not designed for long term snapshots (ie keeping a yearly snapshot) but is more for temporary moments in time. Is that assumption correct?
Thanks again,
Ryan
This is great! Could you post your VMware snapshot results in the VMware section – others could benefit from this as we don't have much information with VMware other then our customers posting results on this section. :D
Yes you will need to take a snapshot for each Volume, you can create up to 10 but this can be a performance hit. Estimate the amount of changes you expect and set this size. Snapshot is not designed for long term, our research and development team will be working on developing more advancements to this in the future but no date is set as of yet.
Interesting. I've been doing addiational testing for this.
It seems that you can schedule multiple snapshots to occur for the same snapshot volume (ie. one at 2:00 am and one at 12:00 noon) and it takes the first snap but when the second one rolls around nothing happens. I've looked through logs for errors and I can't find it. Which one should I look for? If it's using LVM to do snapshots (which it looks like it's doing) those errors should be in the system log (ie. messages). Where can I find that?
Is this expected or should I not be able to schedule more than one snapshot for the same snap volume?
When reviewing the logs for the Snapshot and errors download the logs then go to the Task directory and critical_error logs to see if you have errors that are not presenting themselves. Could you also send your logs to support@open-e to have our engineers review them to see if there is an issue.
Also I wanted to update you that if you are using the 64 bit kernel there is a current bug, so we have blocked this when running more than one Snapshot until new fix has been completed.
I don't think that I'm running the 64 bit kernel. How do I tell?
If you went into the Console screen then ctrl. + alt. + t (Console tools) then selected Boot Options > System Architecture > Single or Multi proc. 64bit. But it does not sound like you went this deep into it. Send logs to support and ask them to check this issue with the Snapshot when using 2 on separate times on same volume. Could be something else is going on.
I have sent the logs into support@open-e.com. Thanks for the help.
Just looked at the logs and noticed you are on version 1.16 we will have new version this week. Currently 1.18 is available now.
I'm currently using the demo CD is the update on that as well?
DSS update will be separate usually the Demo-CD will be updated after ISO update for USB products.