[CentOS] [OT] Building a new backup server

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 2:41 PM,  <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote:
> Hey, Les,
>
>    Thanks for changing the subject to OT.

Errr... I just replied in gmail - I think it has been there all along.

> We have a *bunch* of d/bs. Oracle. MySQL. Postgresql. All with about a
> week's dumps from every night, and then backups of them to the b/u
> servers. I can't imagine how they'd be a win - don't remember just off the
> top of my head if they're compressed or not.

If the dumps aren't pre-compressed, they would be compressed on the
backuppc side.  And if there are unchanged copies on the target hosts
(i.e. more than the current night's dumps) that would still be
recognized by the rsync run as unchanged, even though backuppc is
looking at the compressed copy.    If you already compress on the
target host, there's not much more you can do.

> A *lot* of our data is not huge text files - lots and lots of pure
> datafiles, output from things like Matlab, R, and some local programs,
> like the one for modeling protein folding.

Anything that isn't already compressed, encrypted, or isn't strictly
intentionally random is likely to compress 2 to 10x.  Just poking
through the 'compression summary' on my backuppc servers, I don't see
anything less than 55% and most of the bigger targets are closer to
80% compression.   One that has 50Gb of logfiles, is around 90%.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com