[CentOS] Backup server

Thu Jan 14 13:11:31 UTC 2010
Benjamin Franz <jfranz at freerun.com>

Sorin Srbu wrote:
> Today I have five 500GB-disks raided on linux machine. Remove one for 
> parity
> and I have 2TB of real space available. Doing a 0+1, ie 1TB, would indeed be 
> better as performance goes, but 1TB of space, well, it just isn't enough 
> unfortunately.
>
> As it is now, the 2TB shebang is mounted as /backup. Does that count as a 
> single filesystem?


If you have any budget at all, invest in bigger drives. 7200 RPM 1 TB 
RAID rated drives can be bought for $160 each. Desktop rated 5900 RPM 
1.5 TB drives (which you can probably get away with in a dedicated 
backup server since you don't care a lot about speed and can tolerate 
long pauses for sector repair) can be bought for $110 each. Check Newegg.

Second, to maximize 'depth' of backups you should use a 'Tower of 
Hanoi'-like backup system.

For example:

1 day
2 days
4 days
8 days
16 days

etc

If your selected backup software supports either hardlinking or plain 
old incremental backups that will keep the size of backups down a lot 
while giving you history.

-- 
Benjamin Franz