Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:
> On 07/24 06:47 , Les Stott wrote:
>
>> 2. Plug in an external usb drive, mount it as an ext3 wherever you like,
>> or go with hal which might auto mount it as /media/usbdisk
>> (p.s. in my experience firewire cards dont always have enough drivers
>> for linux, and i dont think speed is an issue)
>> 3. Install backuppc from the source tarball and make the data directory
>> the usb drive at the root of the drive.
>>
>
> I've tried doing similar things to this. I have a few cautionary comments.
>
> - There's no need to install from a tarball. If you don't want to just mount
> the USB drive on /var/lib/backuppc; use a bind mount to make it appear
> there as well as the place it appears. ('man mount', '/--bind'). Packages
> make your administrative life easier; use them. :)
>
yes they do, its just that the installer for backuppc from source, IMHO
is first rate and straightforward.
but you could definitely mount the drive on the appropriate directory
and make use of --bind, or i guess a symlink would work also. Just for
me i've always mounted things on /mnt/device, its what i'm comfortable
with ;)
> - The reliability of external USB drives is very dubious in my experience.
> Perhaps I had a run of bad luck, but out of 4-5 different USB HDD setups
> that I bought within a 6 month period; I had problems with well over half
> of them. (Including a really expensive shock-mounted ruggedized one).
> Drives fail, enclosures fail, controllers fail; I've seen all that in one
> form or another. So test them thoroughly, but I've found that if it
> survives a few hours of bonnie++ testing, it should be ok. The bit that
> concerns me most is power outages. Make sure your external drive is
> plugged into a UPS as well. Otherwise you get filesystem corruption when
> the power fluctuates.
>
Agree on the UPS and this is what i do also. Pity about the
unreliability, i haven't seen that sort of percentage of failures,
infact not had any failures at all. Probably got about 6 sites doing
this, a couple rotate two drives in and out weekly. All work fine. I
always use the Maxtor's for external drives.
Hence, one other reason to use a couple of drives and rotate them. And
if you are super-paranoid then your internal sata or pata can be setup
as an archive host to do periodic backups back to disk.
> - It should also be noted that even USB2/Firewire drives are notably slower
> than internal PATA/SATA drives.
>
>
yep, noted. In all my setups backups run overnight and they've got a 12
hour period to complete, so speed is not an issue, but may be if you
have large data and a short time frame. Perhaps e-sata could come into
play? have not played with that yet.
> In principle it's a perfectly good scheme; I just want to let people know
> I've had problems trying to do the same thing (backuppc data pool on an
> external drive).
>
>
always valuable insights!
Thanks,
Les
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc.
Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop.
Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser.
Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/
_______________________________________________
BackupPC-users mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
