Re: regarding data backup

[Buchan Milne <bgmilne@staff.telkomsa.net>]

On Thursday 09 August 2007 19:22:27 Arunachalam Parthasarathy wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I am using openldap 2.3.36.
>
> Is it better to use slapcat to backup the data and use it during recovery
> (after  disk partition crash) using slapadd ?
>
> Or backup the transaction log files of BDB , so that recovery will be done
> using openldap's automatic recovery functionality or dbrecover utility of
> bdb ?
>
> Please correct me if I am wrong in the process of data maintenance.


Depending on your requirements, and the expertise of the admins, there may be 
advantages to both.

If you have a small database (e.g. < 10 000 entries) with a low update rate 
(e.g. less than 1 modification per second), then slapadd is probably the best 
option.

If you have a very large database, and you have frequent updates, using the 
transaction logs may provide a better means to doing a point-in-time recovery 
(especially if you need backups to be in sync with some other system).

Using an ldif dump is more portable (across different backends and database 
libraries).

So, unless you have specific requirements, an LDIF export via slapcat is 
probably the best option.

Regards,
Buchan