I think for now I am going to build FreeBSD VM on my windows box and
dedicate it to running Bacula Director and Storage Daemon, I was able
to get a 20MB sustained through put through the VMware USB emulation
copying a file from an SFTP as I had no large files on the local
system from my test FreeBSD 9 VM.  Though now I don't know why I
didn't think to just us dd from /dev/random to a file on the disk,
will likely give that a try once my new VM is built. This will get me
by performance to a workable speed until I can come up with a more
permanent solution, and keep me from spending more money this month so
I have a little bit left to add to my savings account.

Just an update to this thread in case anyone runs into it, and thinks building a FreeBSD VM within VMware to run Bacula backups to a USB hard drive is a good idea. It turns out that it isn't, not sure if its a VMware FreeBSD guest issue, or a general VMware USB issue, but the heavy load on the USB drive has caused several crashes of the host system. Which of course in turn means a hard crash of the FreeBSD virtual machine, complete with corrupted file systems. It did give me some practice recovering lost Bacula database as I lost my whole PostgreSQL database due to corrupted files once. This might work for many small files, backups ran OK for my web server, but backups against the FreeNAS server with around 200G about 100G is an iTunes library, and around another 20G is photos. When hitting these bigger files with less overhead that allowed for more throughput to the USB device the crashes began to occur.

Of course, I should note this setup was done with a FreeBSD9.0-Release virtual machine built from source, using clang, and all ports where possible also built with clang. And running open-vm-tools (these do fail to build with clang) as the VMware tools won't install on FreeBSD 9.0 I am sure VMware has not done any testing with this setup yet, nor do I know if they ever will. So the problem may not exist with other guest operating systems.

Also of note, I was originally running under a windows 7 host PC, after the crashes, I switched to CentOS 6 on the host, with a windows Virtual machine to run the applications needing windows. The crashes still occur under CentOS, though a little less frequent than they did under windows.

--
Thanks,
 Dean E. Weimer
 http://www.dweimer.net/
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