[CentOS] slow usb hard disk performance.

Mon Dec 5 22:04:15 UTC 2005
Bryan J. Smith <thebs413 at earthlink.net>

Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Amanda has done that for at least 15 years now.  It's
> clunky to restore, but they got the backup side right
> from the beginning.  You can tell it how much bandwidth
> to use on your network(s) and it will stream that much
> into the holding disk simultaneously from many different
> hosts, writing to tape in sequence as they are completely
> received.

Buffering is better than what I normally see.

But ultimately, the disk-to-disk sync, multiple volume
storage, and then "export to" (and "import from") tape
functionality is what today's VTL offers.

> Since it is almost full-auto - I still let amanda run tapes
> to be held offsite but I really don't ever want to use them
> except as a last resort,

But what about having Amanda not commit things to tape, and
retrieve from the disk backup?  Not quite, eh?  ;->

> hence the offsite backuppc disk.

But not that's an entirely different solution.  Wouldn't it
be nice if the solution was catered to disk-to-disk, but also
let you export/import to/from tape for select backups?  ;->

BTW, I've just had a lot of clients send their disks out for
data recovery.  So I can't condone off-line disk.

Now if you take the disk off-site and put it in another
system, that'd different.  As long as it is getting
periodically exercised, that is good.

> My backuppc archive probably has at least a million
> hardlinks and conventional copy mechanisms take longer than
> practical.

Hardlinks _can_ be stored in a stream archive format.  ;->

Again, I think this is more about the lack of a good, unified
open source system of disk-to-disk backup with tape
export/import.  Too many systems are either disk-only or
tape-only (with only disk as buffer in the best case, not
multi-volume/multi-backup management).


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