[CentOS] [OT] Building a new backup server

Tue Nov 5 19:28:43 UTC 2013
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

John R Pierce wrote:
> On 11/5/2013 7:52 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>> I don't think that's going to happen. First, we have an in-house
>> developed backup system that works just fine. Second, we*are*  backup
up something
>> over a hundred servers and workstations to a few backup servers. Third,
>> we are talking, in some cases, of terabytes....
>
> my backuppc server is doing a couple dozen VM's and physical machines,
> linux+solaris+AIX+WindowsServer, I have backups going back to MARCH, and
> the whole pool is just a few terabytes, with an effective compression of
> like 50:1 due to the amount of duplication in those backups.   the
> database server machines run a pre-backup script that either does a
> database dump, or a freeze (for instance, postgresql has
> pg_start_backup()), then backup whats right, and run a post-backup
> script (pg_stop_backup())
>
> its worked remarkably well for me, using a fraction of the disk space
> I'd planned for (both primary and mirror backup servers have room for 36
> 3.5" SAS drives, although they are only stuffed with 20x3TB in raid6+0
> configurations)

As I noted, we make sure rsync uses hard links... but we have a good
number of individual people and projects with who *each* have a good
number of terabytes of data and generated data. Some of our 2TB drives are
over 90% full, and then there's the honkin' huge RAID, and at least one
14TB partition is over 9TB full....

       mark