[CentOS] [OT] Building a new backup server

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 8:20 AM, Sorin Srbu <Sorin.Srbu at orgfarm.uu.se> wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
>> Behalf Of Les Mikesell
>> Sent: den 5 november 2013 15:09
>> To: CentOS mailing list
>> Subject: Re: [CentOS] [OT] Building a new backup server
>>
>> > Can e.g. BackupPC handle several file systems to backup to?
>> > I.e. comp1 through 10 should backup to /bak1, comp 11 through 20 to /bak2
>> > and so on.
>> >
>>
>> The main point of backuppc is that it hard-links all files with
>> identical content to save space, so it needs to put everything on one
>> filesystem.   However, I'm getting pretty good performance running it
>> in virtual machines so the simple approach would be to run different
>> instances in different VMs - making sure they don't share physical
>> disks for their archive partitions, and if possible, using different
>> physical NICs.    I'm running mine under the free version of Vmware
>> ESXi, (which might also solve the problem of missing drivers) but KVM
>> should work equally well.
>
> I'm getting there myself, it would seem. Thanks for confirming this might be
> the "right" way to go.

If you have some time to experiment, look on the backuppc development
list for the new alpha version.  It is very different and does not
need the hardlinks for pooling.  I haven't tried it myself yet, but
would (cautiously...) if I needed to set up a new system.   It may
eliminate the single-filesystem requirement and will definitely make
it more feasible to rsync the whole archive to maintain an offsite
copy.  I think it may also chunk up large files so unchanged blocks
can be pooled even where the file has some changes.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com