Restoring single-host Mnesia backup on another host? (Best practices?)

[Adam Aquilon]

Hi all!

I'm wondering if it is possible to do a mnesia:backup/1 on one
host (schema with multiple nodes), transfer that file to another
host (different hostname,IP) and restore it there?


Background:

We have a simple system running as 3-4 nodes on a single linux host.
Some tables are shared among the nodes, others are local.
We do periodic backups of the data in all tables by calling
mnesia:backup/1 from a cron job.

We'd like to have another host as a standby machine in case the first
one has some kind of problem. (Note: The erlang software must not
be running on the standby machine.)

It would be nice to be able to propagate the backup files to the standby
machine on a regular basis, and then, if the live machine fails, be able
to just startup the system on the standby machine, load the backup and
continue running!

Does Mnesia have the ability to replace, ignore or bypass hostnames in
its housekeeping information?

Or is there an easy way of doing this kind of thing in a restore filter
of some kind?

Maybe some other solution to the general problem?
(The preferred solution would be to use Mnesia in distributed mode
between the two hosts, but that won't work in our case.)

I realize that replacing host-specific stuff in the table *contents*
would be very tricky, but we'll handle that specific problem ourselves.


/Adam Aquilon