On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 09:44:59AM -0500, Ken Long wrote: > Second, I was thinking on this over the weekend and had come up with > something similar to the suggestion below, however, I noticed you can > get 800GB external USB drives now. Has anyone considered taking the > external USB drive and rsyncing to that and sending that off site? an > 800GB drive is only about $600 and as someone else pointed out, a proper > new tape setup will run upwards of $8k now. Could buy quite a few USB > drives for that. > > Has anyone tried doing anything like that? I think I'd rather do rsync > than xfs_copy because then when the drive comes back in rotation, I only > have to copy over what has changed, rather than dumping the whole file > system.
trying to use rsync to copy the backuppc store at the file level will not make you happy - there are way too many individual files/hard links, which means rsync memory usage will be insane, and you will spend hours or days seeking the disk head to read directory entries and then inodes. You might have luck using rsync to copy the entire raw device, but rsync would need patches to read the raw device itself. Such patches might already exist, i have not looked - wayne davison might even do it for you if you ask on the rsync mailing list nicely. > For right now, I could fit everything on an 800GB drive - not sure if > new ones will grow in size fast enough to keep up with me as my data > grows, but I would imagine worst case, you could take two of them and > join them with LVM somehow, couldn't you? yes, or with software RAID. > What would be the pitfalls with this? Do these drives usually travel > well? (meaning, tapes aren't so big a deal if the courier bounces them > around - could an external usb drive stand up to that or would it need > to be packed special?) Any other thoughts? i guarantee you that tape will be more durable than hard drives. can't say whether this will matter for typical fedex handling but i woud be sure to package them well. > > Thanks! > > > -Ken > > > > > > On Mon, 2006-03-06 at 13:11 +0100, Olivier LAHAYE wrote: > > Le Thursday 02 March 2006 19:19, Ken Long a écrit : > > > I've been trying to search through this list and through google to > > > figure out the answer to this question, but have not found a good answer > > > yet. > > > > > > > We are using USB2 Disks for offsite storage with xfscopy. > > Our BackupPC data is stored on a 1.6TB RAID5 disk bay on an XFS filesystem. > > The actual physical used space is about 300GB. > > To backup the thing, we are doing an xfscopy into a file on the mounted > > USB2 > > drive (which is 400GB). (it takes 4 to 9Hours to complete the 300GB copy) > > xfscopy is an intelligent dd that only copies used blocks. The resulting > > file > > is an image file that can be mounted. > > > > In case of catastrophic disaster: > > we take a PC > > install our distro (Mandriva 2006.0) > > install our backuppc-2.1.2pl1 RPM > > mount the USB drive in /mnt/disk > > mount -o loop /mnt/disk/backuppc_data.img /data > > recover httpd config from the disk and recreate /var/lib/backuppc links > > to /data/.... > > start backuppc daemon > > and it works realy well. > > > > Problem: we are limited to 400GB of physical data. > > If we need more, then we will have to xfscopy to a tape and in that case, > > we > > will have to recover the copy to a image file or a partition in case of > > disaster. > > > > Olivier. > > -- > > Olivier LAHAYE > > Motorola Labs IT Manager > > Computer & Information Systems > > European Communications Research > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > > This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language > > that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast > > and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! > > http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd_______________________________________________ > > BackupPC-users mailing list > > BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net > > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users > > http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language > that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast > and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! > http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid0944&bid$1720&dat1642 > _______________________________________________ > BackupPC-users mailing list > BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users > http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ danno -- dan pritts - systems administrator - internet2 734/352-4953 office 734/834-7224 mobile ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid0944&bid$1720&dat1642 _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
