> ... there will be more than 20TB of data to be > backup weekly which will take lots of hours. ...
Check out the `rsync` spinoff of Samba. `Rsync`s basic idea is "copy what's changed" rather than just copying everything. It does so very well and very quickly. Copying only changed files can easily be a couple of orders of magnitude quicker than copying the whole thing. The possible flaw with this strategy that used to keep people from implementing it was that the determination of what's changed had to be _perfect_. A backup's no good if it only contains 99% of the current data. The `rsync` tool provides the needed reliabilty, making this strategy possible in real life rather than just pie in the sky. (Of course your backup medium needs to be a disk farm rather than tapes...) My situation is much smaller than yours: a little over 1000 users with a total of a little over 100GB of data. When I started using `rsync`, my backups went from many hours once a month (clearly not frequent enough, but we couldn't afford to do better) to ~10 minutes every day. (I don't use any features of Samba itself, and I don't use any aspect of LVM.) And that ~10 minutes is even with the backup on a separate machine accessed over a network, so bandwidth's limited to 100MB. A SAN would probably do quite a bit better. (The completely separate machine is our way of avoiding a single point of failure.) (And because the backup is to another disk, the backup disk can be made available read-only to lots of folks. As a result, in my situation anybody can restore any individual file at any time virtually instantaneously.) (The first time will of course take a long long time, but after that daily updates will be real quick.) -Chuck Kollars ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba