Hi again,
after a long New Year’s break, I’m back to deliver the promised procedure of backup via rsync when working with Openfiler.
In the previous post I described the hardware situation in our company, so it should be clear by now that I have two Openfiler machines: one in production, and another one in standby.
Before I get into the details, I wanna tell you about some things you may want to consider.

The Openfiler is actually able to do the DRDB, which is a High Availability setup, when the production machine is replicated online to the backup one. Each of them has an IP, plus they have another virtual IP that they pass on to each other in case of failure. The users (and the DNS) actually work with this VIP. So any failure is actually transparent to everybody. It’s a standard HA setup. The only thing I asked myself is what happens if you accidentally delete a file? If it’s going to be replicated immediately to the other machine - what’s the point of having a backup? Actually, I believe I’m not the only one who’s asked that question, so it’s very possible that there are answers and solutions to that, but somehow I decided not to try so hard, especially that we decided that it would be ok to have a backup once a day. YMMV if you need to do it more often. When that was out of the way, it was clear I should go with rsync.
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