Gluster users - Dec 2016 - restoring a volume: best practise for backup and restore

A search reveals little definitive in the way of best practise for backing up
and restoring glusterfs volumes.

I'm particularly interested in best practise for replicated volumes. Is
there any recommended way that is both efficient and proven?

It seems that geo-replication, snapshotting and glusterfind all provide options.
But what about a simple backup and restore of a brick using standard backup
tools?

The question needs to be asked because our na?ve use of a backup tool has
created problems. These may be specific to our environment but our environment
is unlikely to be ultra-special. We are using gluster 3.7 on CentOS 7.2 and a
standard package install.

An issue may be that we do not have native fuse installed. It seems that this is
a recognised feature with Red Hat:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=947830 .

Use though only of glusterfs-fuse seems to result in replication only when the
volume is accessed via gluster mechanisms. E.g. writing to an NFS mounted volume
does result in the file being replicated across all replica nodes.

However, creating a file directly in a brick (as would be normal in a backup
restore) does not result in replication as claimed in
http://blog.gluster.org/category/volumes/ where it is supposedly demonstrated
using touch. We also find that restarting the volume does not result in
replication. Our volumes are indeed of type cluster/replicate. My guess is that
the missing fuse package is the reason why.

But it seems from tools like bitrot (which can seemingly detect and scrub data
resulting from '"backend" tinkering of bricks') that restoring
to a brick directly may not be best practise.

Nevertheless, we require a means to restore a replicated volume from a backup
copy and we need to be able to go back to a point in time and not rely on the
last saved state (as in geo-replication). We also want to be able to restore
single volumes and leave others as is. And we would like to avoid having to go
through an intermediate backup/restore server where the volumes are mounted.

I am keen to know what others have found works well.

Thanks
Paul
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Fuse or not, you just can't do anything to the brick.
Backup and restore the mount point (be it NFS or fuse) and everything will be
fine,
gluster will take care of re-distributing the files to the correct brick.

No point in backuping the brick themselves by the way, keep the volume config
somewhere
but that's it :)

-- 
Kevin Lemonnier
PGP Fingerprint : 89A5 2283 04A0 E6E9 0111
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