[CentOS] [OT] Building a new backup server

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 10:48 AM,  <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote:
>> >
>>> I'm not quite at that scale in a single instance myself, but I'm
>>> fairly sure many users on the backuppc mail list are, so it is not
>>> necessarily a problem, although there are some tradeoffs with extra
>>> overhead for compression and the extra pool hardlink.  In any case it
>>> is trivial to install and test with the package in EPEL.  Even if it
>>> doesn't replace your server backup system you might find it useful to
>>> point at some workstations or windows boxes (it can use smb as well as
>>> rsync or tar to gather the files).
>>>
>> Heh. We don't do Windows. That's desktop support.... (As a side note, I
>> work for a federal contractor at a non-defense site, so scale is, um,
>> larger than many.)
>
> The scaling side of things just trades a little more CPU for
> compression and rsync-in-perl in return for vastly less disk
> consumption so it's not a sure bet either way in that respect.  I
> think you've mentioned some subsequent off-line archiving scheme for
> your data sets that wouldn't mesh very well, though.   But, everyone
> has lots of other stuff where backups would be nice to have and
> backuppc makes it trivial to have, say, daily copies of all of /etc
> from all machines going back months - or your own home directory.
> And it doesn't blow up if you point it at a bunch of home directories
> where developers have checked out copies of the same big source trees.

Still not sounding like we need it. We back up /etc from all our servers
(except for the compute cluster nodes every night, and keep about 5 weeks.
Home directories are 100% NFS-mounted from servers, and those are backed
up every night onto a handful of backup servers, as are various project
directories.

       mark