I'm looking for a NAS, but I would really like to use dirvish (see below) and I'm skeptical that most NASes will support dirvish properly. My priority, however, is to find an off-the-shelf solution that "just works".
I like dirvish for the following reasons: * it's relatively easy to set up (eg: I've done it before) * it stores incremental backups in a way that is trivial to restore data -- I can not stress enough how much I want to be able to easily navigate my backups and just copy files out to restore data. Dirvish creates date-indexed directory trees that use (hard?) links to save space and present a, uh, "WYSIWYG" view of your backups. This is essential :) Unfortunately, when I last used dirvish, I found that it really doesn't work well if you mount the backup volume with a protocol that doesn't support hard links. (This includes samba and sshfs.) The linking commands silently fall back to creating new copies of the data, so the incremental nature of dirvish doesn't end up saving any space -- I've quickly filled multi-tb drives with nightly workstation backups because of this. Does anyone know of a NAS that either has dirvish support, or exports drives in a way that I can mount them and successfully use dirvish? Alternatively, does any one know of a backup solution that would fill the same desiderata above? I'm considering a buffalo tech. terastation or linkstation -- my gf. has used one with a number of windows systems, and it seems to be reliable. They also run linux, which I obviously support, and there is a debian-based distro that will run on them, so in a pinch I could install that and set dirvish up in that way, however, I would really rather just have an off-the-shelf solution that "just works" (and some of the other buffalo tech features sound really nice -- such as the built-in bittorrent client). Based on my Googling, it seems that most people just mount terastations with samba, which (afaik) still won't work for dirvish. This is for a home solution, so I'm not looking for a multi-thousand dollar solution, or insane redundancy. Thanks for your input! --Rogan _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
