Backing Up a Lustre File System

Lustre provides backups at several levels. Generally, file system-level backups are recommended over device-level backups.

File System-level Backups
A file system-level backup gives you full control over the files to back up and allows restoration of individual files as needed. File system-level backups are also easier to integrate into existing backup solutions.

File system backups are performed from a Lustre client (or many clients working parallel in different directories) rather than on individual server nodes, similar to backing up any other file system. However, due to the large size of most Lustre file systems, it is not always possible to complete a full backup. We recommend that you back up subsets of the file system, such as sub-directories of the entire directory, filesets for a single user, or files incremented by date.

For information about device-level or file-level backups or using the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) snapshot feature to make incremental backups of a Lustre file system, see Chapter 15 in the Lustre Operations Manual.