[CentOS] OT - Linux NAS for Windows Environment

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 11:30, Troy Engel wrote:
> > 
> > A really nice tool for nightly backups with a history kept on-line
> > is backuppc http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/.  It probably
> 
> I've played with this a little, and my comment in the negative is that
> it's a do-or-die on a whole system. You don't get fine grained control
> of exactly what you want (for instance, I may only want /etc/ and
> /var/named/ of the DNS/DHCP server, D:\My Documents\ of a shared Windows
> PC, etc) and pretty much have to suck the whole thing up.

That's not really true. You have all the facilities that the
underlying transports (rsync/tar/or smb shares) provide to specify
what to include or exclude.  On the Windows side you can just
share the My Documents folder if you want.  If your machines all
have different layouts, you'll have to make a separate config file
for each target, but that's not difficult and it's a one-time job.

> This really isn't a *snapshot* feature, per se - it's a backup.

Agreed, but you get some of the features of snapshots, like
having many versions on-line at once and browsable by their
owner as well as the admin(s), plus the extra safety of having
the copy on a different machine.

> A
> snapshot (should be|is) a lot more space conservative and lean running
> that won't affect operation of the NAS in realtime.

Backuppc is even more space-conservative than filesystem snapshots
but it does do a lot of work to accomplish that.

> The hardcore
> snapshot feature of NetApp/SnapServer really is great, it's hard to
> beat. I may be a linux nut, but sometimes a commercial solution is the
> right answer for a specific situation.

Yes, I've used a NetApp (actually the Dell rebranded one), but those
snapshots don't solve all your problems.  It's rare, but if you lose
2 drives at once the raid will fail - and the snapshots are annoying
when you try to make copies elsewhere since you always have to
remember to exclude them.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com