[CentOS] External HDD query

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Rajagopal Swaminathan
<raju.rajsand at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 7:14 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Look at backuppc.  It has a nice web interface to manage it and
>>> browse/restore backups and it compresses and pools identical content
>>> to hold much more online than you would expect.   It is all controlled
>>> from the linux side and can work with windows either over smb or you
>>> can install cygwin rsync to save bandwidth.
>
> BTW, how may persondays it would require on a Centos 5.7 box to
> master?

The second time you install it will take about 15 minutes using the
EPEL package and having the archive disk mounted under
/var/lib/BackupPC (or with a symlink there to the real mount) before
the install so everything lands in the right place.  The first time
will depend on how much you already know about the underlying concepts
and tools.

> I have squandered away about 75% of available time (of about 2
> person days). Amanda, IMHO, requires about 1 person week to deploy
> initially and about 2 person weeks to get sign-off: am I right about
> it? or am I inefficient (the "in about 15-minute" is a myth with
> Centos 5.x maybe truth with Centos 6 -- I dunno)?

It depends on how much you want to know about it, and whether you
decide to install cygwin rsync on the windows targets or just use
samba against the hidden admin shares (C$, etc.).  For the initial
setup with the EPEL package the only tricky part is adding the web
password for the admin user and possibly others if you want logins
restricted to seeing only certain hosts.  See the comments in
/etc/httpd/conf.d/BackupPC.conf about that.

The docs are at http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/BackupPC.html but
you should be able to do all necessary configuration from the web
interface after the packaged install, and if you are adding several
similar targets, just get the first one right and add the others with
'newhost=oldhost'  from the 'edit hosts' link on the web page to copy
the configs.

> There is a External NTFS partition which will be carried away and the
> whole shop is powered off at about 2000hrs.

Backuppc uses hardlinks extensively so you'll want that to be ext3,
not ntfs, and I'd highly recommend rotating a set of 2 or 3 different
disks so you always have a good one offsite.   I use a slighly odd
raid-mirroring setup myself but it's fairly cumbersome to manage.   In
any case you need some sort of script to stop the backuppc service and
unmount the drive before removing it, and the reverse when replacing,
and backuppc has a nightly cleanup process that has to run, so you may
have to adjust the timing for it.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com