The easiest way to backup an ldap database

slapcat.

There are a lot of ways to do this, and I have experimented with several.

For example, you can copy the master’s database files to the replica.  But this comes with some restrictions. 1. Both hosts must have compatible versions of the dbm libraries2 both hosts must be roughly the same architecture 3 some methods of copying sparse dbm files (eg copy) will fill in the holes, making the files larger.

A more general way to backup  an ldap database or to replicate the db is slapcat.  eg.

root@master # slapcat -b “dc=myldap,dc=org” -l backupcontents.ldif
#… copy backupcontents.ldif to backup or slave
#Then, to restore or add or whatever
root@slave # slapadd -l backupcontents.ldif