On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 11:10, Troy Engel wrote:
Ed Morrison wrote:
I'm looking to find a Linux NAS solution for a Windows network. Looking into FreeNAS and OpenFiler. Anyone using these or any other solution? Any comments/suggestions?
From the longtime experience direction, be sure to figure out the
snapshotting upfront; a good snapshot rotation can save you so much pain it's not funny; many commercial NAS (NetApp, SnapServer, EMC, etc) have this integrated. When looking at a DIY linux NAS, you may have to roll it up.
I think there are still problems with LVM2 snapshots. And, you have to realize that there are certain disasters where the snapshot will melt too.
We snapshot roughly like so: [8a,12p,4p M-F] [nightly 2 nights retention] -- this setup is enough to provide instantanious file restore without having to deal with the backups. (classic "hey IT, I deleted a file last night...")
Personally I've used rdiff as a snapshot-esque tool and it works pretty well, but not very good when the underlying link dies; it's not the exact right tool. rsnapshot is also in the same vein, but again it's not quite the exact snapshot type of thing that a NetApp provides. I bet there are better choices out there...
A really nice tool for nightly backups with a history kept on-line is backuppc http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/. It probably isn't practical to do runs more often than daily, but the compression/linking scheme allows keeping a much longer history than you would expect. You can also designate 'owners' for a machine and allow them to restore their own files or grab older copies back through the web interface. Since the backups generally run at night you may be able to stick some big drives in a desktop machine that would otherwise be idle to run it.