Ned Slider wrote:
> Tom Bishop wrote:
>> Lots of opinions out there and I have read and read, so I have a home server
>> that I have finally setup with a hot swap hdd cage and what I am planning on
>> doing is copying my data drive every other day and rotating them offsite,
>> haven't figured out how often though. So I did my first test last night and
>> the backup drive was formatted with ext3 but looking to try to speed things
>> up and was wondering what would be my best choice. Most of my data is on
>> VM's and the hdd files on some of them are quite large, I have used JFS and
>> reiser in the past and was leaning on going with JFS but am tempted to look
>> at XFS. So what I was wondering are what are folks experiences (instead of
>> opinions) with different filesystems and while I want speed it needs to be
>> reliable since it will be my back up data....running centos 5.4 x64
>>
>>
>> Thanks in advance...
>>
>
> Not the question you asked, but I'm guessing the choice of backup method
> for "copying" the data will have far more effect than the choice of
> filesystem. How are you backing up the data? Presumably something like
> rsync will speed up matters considerably over a straight copy once the
> first pass is done.
Yes, I'd go for 'well-tested' and 'reliable' over speed on a backup drive. Some
filesystems are faster at creating/deleting large numbers of files but if you
use rysnc you'll only track the changes after the first run. Note that rsync
keeps the whole directory tree in memory during the copy (and probably 2 copies
for same-machine runs) so if you have a large number of files it will help to
have plenty of RAM. This is supposed to be improved in the 3.x versions of
rsync (available from rpmforge).
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com