Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-27 Thread Ralf Gross
Holger Parplies schrieb:
 Hi,
 
 Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote on 2011-05-26 06:05:48 -0500 [Re: 
 [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC]:
  On 05/26 12:20 , Adam Goryachev wrote:
   BTW, specifically related to backuppc, many years ago, reiserfsck was
   perfect as it doesn't have any concept or limit on 'inodes'... Same for
   mail and news (nntp) servers. Do XFS/JFS have this feature? I'll look
   into these things another day, when I have some time :)
  
  There are indeed 'inodes' listed in the 'df -i' output of XFS filesystems.
  However, I've never heard of anyone hitting the inode limit on XFS, unlike
  ext3.
 
 of course XFS *has* inodes, and I wondered about the 'df -i' output, too, when
 I tried it yesterday. I don't remember reiserfs giving any meaningful
 information for 'df -i' ... nope, '0 0 0 -'. I sincerely hope that XFS doesn't
 have *static inode allocation*, meaning I have to choose the number of inodes
 at file system creation time and waste any space I reserve for them but do not
 turn out to need. That was one main concern when choosing my pool FS.
 Actually, mkfs.xfs(8) explains a parameter '-i maxpct=value':
 
 This  specifies  the  maximum percentage of space in
 the filesystem that can be allocated to inodes.  The
 default  value  is 25% for filesystems under 1TB, 5%
 for filesystems under 50TB and  1%  for  filesystems
 over 50TB.
 
 The further explanation says this is achieved by the data block allocator
 avoiding lower blocks, which are needed for obtaining 32-bit inode numbers.
 It leaves two questions unanswered (to me, at least):
 ...

have a look at the inode64 mount option.

http://xfs.org/index.php/XFS_FAQ#Q:_What_is_the_inode64_mount_option_for.3F

Ralf

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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-26 Thread Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom
On 05/26 12:20 , Adam Goryachev wrote:
 BTW, specifically related to backuppc, many years ago, reiserfsck was
 perfect as it doesn't have any concept or limit on 'inodes'... Same for
 mail and news (nntp) servers. Do XFS/JFS have this feature? I'll look
 into these things another day, when I have some time :)

There are indeed 'inodes' listed in the 'df -i' output of XFS filesystems.
However, I've never heard of anyone hitting the inode limit on XFS, unlike
ext3.

$ mount
/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
snip
/dev/sda3 on /var/lib/backuppc type xfs (rw,noatime)
$ df -i
FilesystemInodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda11969920   54048 19158723% /
snip
/dev/sda3383991360 6330684 3776606762% /var/lib/backuppc


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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-26 Thread Holger Parplies
Hi,

Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote on 2011-05-26 06:05:48 -0500 [Re: 
[BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC]:
 On 05/26 12:20 , Adam Goryachev wrote:
  BTW, specifically related to backuppc, many years ago, reiserfsck was
  perfect as it doesn't have any concept or limit on 'inodes'... Same for
  mail and news (nntp) servers. Do XFS/JFS have this feature? I'll look
  into these things another day, when I have some time :)
 
 There are indeed 'inodes' listed in the 'df -i' output of XFS filesystems.
 However, I've never heard of anyone hitting the inode limit on XFS, unlike
 ext3.

of course XFS *has* inodes, and I wondered about the 'df -i' output, too, when
I tried it yesterday. I don't remember reiserfs giving any meaningful
information for 'df -i' ... nope, '0 0 0 -'. I sincerely hope that XFS doesn't
have *static inode allocation*, meaning I have to choose the number of inodes
at file system creation time and waste any space I reserve for them but do not
turn out to need. That was one main concern when choosing my pool FS.
Actually, mkfs.xfs(8) explains a parameter '-i maxpct=value':

This  specifies  the  maximum percentage of space in
the filesystem that can be allocated to inodes.  The
default  value  is 25% for filesystems under 1TB, 5%
for filesystems under 50TB and  1%  for  filesystems
over 50TB.

The further explanation says this is achieved by the data block allocator
avoiding lower blocks, which are needed for obtaining 32-bit inode numbers.
It leaves two questions unanswered (to me, at least):

1.) Is this a hard limit, or will inodes continue to be allocated in excess
of this percentage, (a) if more space happens to be free in the lower
blocks, or (b) generating inode numbers exceeding 32 bits, provided the
kernel supports them (probably only 64-bit kernels)?
2.) Will the data block allocator use these blocks up once no other blocks
are available any more, or is your XFS full, even though you've got
another 249GB(!) free on your 1TB FS, that are reserved for inodes?

The answer to (2) is most likely the data block allocator will use them,
because the man page goes on:

Setting the value to 0 means that essentially all of
the filesystem can become inode blocks,  subject  to
inode32 restrictions.

(however, it could be a special case for the value 0). In fact, the very
concept of allocating inodes rather than reserving fixed blocks for them
strongly suggests some flexibility in deciding how much space will be used
for them and how much for data.

In any case, the default percentage seems to allow for far more inodes than
with ext[23], which might explain why you hit the boundary later (if at all).

Regards,
Holger

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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-25 Thread Michael Stowe
 On 24/05/2011 11:25 PM, Michael Stowe wrote:
 I did a relatively short filesystem comparison when I moved my BackupPC
 pool to another set of drives.  The high level results:

 jfs, xfs:  quick, stable
 reiserfs:  not stable
 ext4:  slow
 ext3:  very slow

 The not stable designation comes from power-off-during-write tests.
 Other filesystems generally handled this gracefully, but reiserfs
 corrupted the entire tree, and the recovery tools didn't get it back
 intact.

 Just a couple of my own personal comments on reiserfs:
 1) It does usually handle random power-offs on both general servers and
 backuppc based servers.

Usually doesn't really do it for me.

The problem seems to be in the structure of the trees and the rebuild tree
routines, which just grabs every block that looks like they're reiserfs
tree blocks.

 2) It does sometimes have problems resurrecting the filesystem when it
 has been corrupted, I did lose *one* home directory out of 400 once upon
 a time (about 9 years ago...)

Like I said, a filesystem that loses data *sometimes* doesn't really make
it to the top of the list, in favor of filesystems that ... don't have
this problem.

 3) I've used reiserfs on both file servers and backuppc servers for
 quite a long time (and also desktops until very recently) with no
 problems that I wouldn't expect from any other FS. One backuppc server I
 used it with never expired any backup, and did daily backups of about 5
 servers with a total of 700G data. This was working fine for over 5
 years (turned off recently due to company issues, not technical).

There are plenty of things that run perfectly well when unstressed.  For
example, 32-bit zfs runs *perfectly* well, unless you try to rsync the
whole filesystem...  in which case it panics the kernel.

 I would expect that any FS will *sometimes* have a problem fixing it's
 FS after a power loss unless you use journally on the data as well as
 the FS info. Perhaps in your testing you either didn't enable the
 correct journalling options, or found that particular corner case.
 Perhaps next time it happens jfs/xfs might hit their corner cases.

This doesn't ring true nor does it match the results of my testing.  I
didn't tune any file systems.  xfs and jfs were resilient to simple power
fail situations, reiserfs was not.  You can speculate that xfs and jfs may
contain the same flaws but some kind of blind luck kept them working
properly, but it seems *really* unlikely.

Further, simply running a filesystem is not the same as testing and
recovering it.  It's certainly possible to have run a FAT filesystem under
Windows 3.1 for 20 years.  This doesn't make it a robust choice.

 My understanding of reiserfs development is that it is stable, and being
 in the linux tree, is maintained.

Stable development and being a stable filesystem aren't the same thing,
naturally.

 However, while I liked reiserfs a lot, I've recently found that support
 for it is declining (can't even select it as a FS option when installing
 some new OS's), and that other FS's offer a lot of the same performance
 features, thus making reiserfs somewhat obsolete. It would be nice to
 see some real performance benchmarks with reiserfs and jfx/xfs but I
 can't really be bothered, and probably neither is anyone else.

For my part, I didn't bother because it didn't pass the stable hurdle. 
It doesn't matter how fast it is if it can't preserve the data intact.

Frankly, it was the only FS that didn't, which included ext3 -- again,
I'll stress the fact that I actually tested them, I didn't just trust that
everything was intact.

 I expect
 reiserfs will eventually go away, and as such I'm migrating away from it
 as my systems are retired/etc (but it will be in use for a long time as
 it isn't easy to format and restore or migrate large amounts of data...)

 I don't mean to disparage xfs/jfs or any testing anybody has done, just
 wanted to share my personal experiences.

Since you don't appear to be arguing that people actually use reiserfs,
you're speculating that xfs/jfs contain flaws without any apparent
evidence, and your personal experiences don't appear to include testing,
I'm not really sure where you're going with this.

Due to time constraints, I didn't do a great many trials, but I'll give
you an idea of what my testing entailed:

On a 7-drive array (5+2 RAID), make a new filesytem, and point the
BackupPC pool at it.
A script runs that uses X10 to physically power down the box once it
senses the presence of a test file.  This script is used for both the
initial backup and the link phase, both of which are restarted once during
the trial.  (This script was originally timed to power down one hour into
the backup, but since the backups ran at different speeds on the
filesystems, it seemed likely that the backups would be at different
points.  To avoid corner cases, they were powered down while backing up
the exact same file.)

The pool is then compared (via rsync) to the 

Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-25 Thread Les Mikesell
On 5/25/2011 8:40 AM, Michael Stowe wrote:

 2) It does sometimes have problems resurrecting the filesystem when it
 has been corrupted, I did lose *one* home directory out of 400 once upon
 a time (about 9 years ago...)

 Like I said, a filesystem that loses data *sometimes* doesn't really make
 it to the top of the list, in favor of filesystems that ... don't have
 this problem.

To be fair, those sometimes are crash situations and it is also a good 
idea to run hardware/operating systems/UPS's, that... don't cause that 
problem.   And to have an offsite copy for the things you can't control.

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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-25 Thread Michael Stowe
 On 5/25/2011 8:40 AM, Michael Stowe wrote:

 2) It does sometimes have problems resurrecting the filesystem when it
 has been corrupted, I did lose *one* home directory out of 400 once
 upon
 a time (about 9 years ago...)

 Like I said, a filesystem that loses data *sometimes* doesn't really
 make
 it to the top of the list, in favor of filesystems that ... don't have
 this problem.

 To be fair, those sometimes are crash situations and it is also a good
 idea to run hardware/operating systems/UPS's, that... don't cause that
 problem.   And to have an offsite copy for the things you can't control.

I'm not arguing against either one -- though given a choice between a
filesystem that will go corrupt if the UPS fails and one that doesn't, I'd
rather go with the one that doesn't, whether I expect to experience a
power failure or not.

I've had UPS batteries blow and power rails burn out in servers before, as
well as had electricians accidentally short out an entire data center, so
I'm not inclined to believe a design flaw in a filesystem can be covered
up by a UPS.  (Neither are you, obviously.)

In this case, the design flaw appears to be reiserfs's storage of
directory entries, et alia, in one massive B+ tree combined with
non-synchronous directory operations, combined with BackupPC's propensity
to perform a LOT of directory operations.

Basically, I'm saying that I believe, based on my testing, that reiserfs
is a very poor choice of filesystem for BackupPC.  I'm not suggesting that
it goes corrupt with normal, continuous use, or that if nothing goes
horribly wrong, it won't be fine.  I'm suggesting it's a really bad idea
to have to count on it.

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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-25 Thread Les Mikesell
On 5/25/2011 10:12 AM, Michael Stowe wrote:

 To be fair, those sometimes are crash situations and it is also a good
 idea to run hardware/operating systems/UPS's, that... don't cause that
 problem.   And to have an offsite copy for the things you can't control.

 I'm not arguing against either one -- though given a choice between a
 filesystem that will go corrupt if the UPS fails and one that doesn't, I'd
 rather go with the one that doesn't, whether I expect to experience a
 power failure or not.

And I'm not really arguing for reiserfs now that there are other 
reasonable choices.  But, I did run it on several systems, including for 
backuppc for several years back when the other choice was ext2 where any 
unexpected restart would take a day of fsck operations before you could 
do anything and in that time I saw several crashes where journal replay 
too care of everything.

 I've had UPS batteries blow and power rails burn out in servers before, as
 well as had electricians accidentally short out an entire data center, so
 I'm not inclined to believe a design flaw in a filesystem can be covered
 up by a UPS.  (Neither are you, obviously.)

Sure - you have to play the odds here and make them better any way you 
can, but I wouldn't put reiserfs corruption at the top of the list of 
things that can make my disks unreadable.

 Basically, I'm saying that I believe, based on my testing, that reiserfs
 is a very poor choice of filesystem for BackupPC.  I'm not suggesting that
 it goes corrupt with normal, continuous use, or that if nothing goes
 horribly wrong, it won't be fine.  I'm suggesting it's a really bad idea
 to have to count on it.

That's all true, but basically putting data on physical disk drives is a 
bad idea in the first place because any number of things can go wrong. 
If you are prepared for your disks to melt, you probably won't have a 
big problem with the relatively unlikely scenario of filesystem corruption.

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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-25 Thread Holger Parplies
Hi,

first of all, my personal experience with reiserfs is also that it lost a
complete pool FS (apparently, the cpool directory disappeared and was
re-created by BackupPC *several times* before I noticed the problem).
Rebuilding the tree obviously gave me a state that is next to impossible
to fix properly (lots of directories in lost+found named by inode - any
volunteers for finding out, where and within which pc/ directory to put
them? ;-), let alone verify the results.

My decision was to move to a different FS. I didn't go the scientific way, I
just chose xfs, which apparently was a good choice - at least up to now.

So I certainly don't disagree with your results, but I do partly disagree with
your reasoning and interpretations.

Michael Stowe wrote on 2011-05-25 08:40:10 -0500 [Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS 
for BackupPC]:
 [Adam wrote:]
  On 24/05/2011 11:25 PM, Michael Stowe wrote:
  [...] The high level results:
 
  jfs, xfs:  quick, stable
  reiserfs:  not stable
  ext4:  slow
  ext3:  very slow

While that is a nice summary, I, personally, wouldn't base any decisions
solely on a summary without having any idea how the results were obtained,
because the methods could be flawed or simply not take my main concerns into
account (e.g. if I have my BackupPC server on a UPS, power loss is not my
primary concern (though it may still be one); long term stability is). For
other people, speed may be vital, while the ability to survive a power failure
is not. You explain in a followup (see below) how you obtained your results.

  The not stable designation comes from power-off-during-write tests.
  [...]
 
  Just a couple of my own personal comments on reiserfs:
  1) It does usually handle random power-offs on both general servers and
  backuppc based servers.
 
 Usually doesn't really do it for me.

I believe that is exactly the point. You simply can't *test* whether a file
system handles *every* power-off case correctly. You can prove that it
doesn't, or you can find that you didn't manage to trigger any problems. So,
while I agree with reiserfs does *not* handle power-offs sufficiently well,
I don't see it as *proven* that xfs/jfs/ext4/ext3 are any better. They might
be better, they might be worse. They are *probably* better, but that is just
speculation. Granted, I'd prefer an FS where I didn't manage to trigger any
problems over one where I did, too. Or one, where the majority of the
community seems to agree that it performs better. However, both choices are
based on experience, not on scientific results.

 The problem seems to be in the structure of the trees and the rebuild tree
 routines, which just grabs every block that looks like they're reiserfs
 tree blocks.

If that is the case, it is certainly problematic. What I also dislike is that
'reiserfsck --rebuild-tree' leaves your FS in an unusable state until it has
completed - let's hope it does complete. All other 'fsck' programs I can
remember having used seem to operate in an incremental way - fixing problems
without causing new ones (except maybe trivial wrong count type
inconsistencies), so they can [mostly] be interrupted without making the
situation worse than it was.

  3) I've used reiserfs on both file servers and backuppc servers for
  quite a long time [...] One backuppc server I used it with [...] did
  daily backups of about 5 servers with a total of 700G data. [...]
 
 There are plenty of things that run perfectly well when unstressed.

What is your understanding of unstressed?

  Perhaps in your testing you either didn't enable the correct journalling
  options, or found that particular corner case. Perhaps next time it
  happens jfs/xfs might hit their corner cases.
 
 This doesn't ring true nor does it match the results of my testing.  I
 didn't tune any file systems.

Perhaps you should have. The default options are not always suitable for
obtaining what you need. In what way doesn't next time jfs/xfs might hit
their corner cases match the results of your testing? As I said, I don't
believe you've proven that jfs/xfs don't *have* corner cases. You just didn't
expose any.

 You can speculate that xfs and jfs may contain the same flaws but some kind
 of blind luck kept them working properly, but it seems *really* unlikely.

The speculation is, that you didn't test the situations that xfs or jfs might
have problems with (and reiserfs might handle perfectly).

 Further, simply running a filesystem is not the same as testing and
 recovering it.  It's certainly possible to have run a FAT filesystem under
 Windows 3.1 for 20 years.  This doesn't make it a robust choice.

Certainly true. But all I can see here are different data points from
different people's *experience*. You're unlikely to experience running
*dozens* of FAT/Win3.1 file systems for 20 years, and if you do, it might
well be a robust choice *for your usage pattern*. That doesn't mean it
will work equally well with different usage patterns, or that if you suddenly

Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-25 Thread Michael Stowe

 So I certainly don't disagree with your results, but I do partly disagree
 with your reasoning and interpretations.

Err, actually, you don't ... or perhaps more accurately, I don't disagree
with any of the points you make, so rather than agree with everything you
said individually, I'll skip ahead.

 If that is the case, it is certainly problematic. What I also dislike is
 that 'reiserfsck --rebuild-tree' leaves your FS in an unusable state
 until it has completed - let's hope it does complete. All other 'fsck'
 programs I can remember having used seem to operate in an incremental
 way - fixing problems without causing new ones (except maybe trivial
 wrong count type inconsistencies), so they can [mostly] be interrupted
 without making the situation worse than it was.

While trying to figure out why reiserfs had gone corrupt, I tested out a
scenario where backing up a reiserfs image via BackupPC (without
compression) would be interpreted as part of the fs by --rebuild-tree, and
hopelessly mangled all data on the disk.

Probably not exactly fair to reiserfs, but it does bother me that backing
up certain types of data could make other corruption unrecoverable.

 What is your understanding of unstressed?

Without pushing its limits -- depending on the fs, these can be in
different places.  None of the file systems melted down when simply
subjected to high amounts of I/O.  (Well, zfs did, but that's different.)

 The speculation is, that you didn't test the situations that xfs or jfs
 might have problems with (and reiserfs might handle perfectly).

Which is reasonable enough, and I'm open to finding out if there are any.

 Certainly true. But all I can see here are different data points from
 different people's *experience*. You're unlikely to experience running
 *dozens* of FAT/Win3.1 file systems for 20 years, and if you do, it might
 well be a robust choice *for your usage pattern*. That doesn't mean it
 will work equally well with different usage patterns, or that if you
 suddenly do encounter corruption, a different FS wouldn't be better
 recoverable.

I'm really suggesting that the experience of somebody who has run a file
system for a period of time without (for example) a power failure is
likely to have little to contribute to answer the question on how stable a
file system is during a power failure.

The testing I did has a natural bias toward the scenarios I wanted to
gather data on, and my specific question was stability and speed while
using BackupPC on software RAID, were there distinctions between
filesystems?

In this regard, reiserfs failed miserably, and perhaps unfairly, part of
the reason I tested in the way I did was due to problems I'd experienced
in the past with reiserfs.  So unless there's a really compelling reason
TO use reiserfs that somehow overrides the corruption issue, I (for one)
am pretty satisfied in ruling it out.

 This is a good example of how hardware may corrupt your FS (or prevent
 corruption that would occur with different hardware). If you are truely
 interested in testing *the file systems*, you should not introduce the
 extra complexity of RAID 6. You were probably more interested in testing
 *how the file systems would operate in your hardware environment*.
That
 is a difference.

Quite so, and I also made the implicit assumption that what the fs sits on
doesn't really matter, which may or may not be the case.

 More or less. You'll have different timestamps in log files, a random
 difference in timing (length of the file in progress) ... I'm just
 wondering what exactly you are comparing. pool means $TopDir or
 $TopDir/{c,}pool or $TopDir/pc?

I actually used FUSE to do a straight compare; since the test box was
quiescent (I eliminated any files that were not) there was a 100% match in
most cases.

 What your test doesn't catch is long term stability. In the absense of
 power
 failures, will your FS operate well over many years? I've heard (rumours,
 not
 real data points) that reiserfs will operate smoothly up to the point
 where
 accumulated internal inconsistency (presumably due to bugs) exceeds a
 certain
 amount, and then it will destroy just about all of your file system. That
 might even match my observation - I don't remember whether there was a
 power
 failure involved or not. I have no long-term first-hand experience with
 xfs
 (or jfs). Does anyone else?

I've run BackupPC on jfs for a few years now, and it has proven to be
rock-solid.  I've run xfs (but not under BackupPC) which has been
similarly trouble-free.

As file systems go, I can recommend jfs, which you can mark down as a
single anecdotal data point.

 Regards,
 Holger




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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-25 Thread Les Mikesell
On 5/25/2011 1:46 PM, Michael Stowe wrote:

 I'm really suggesting that the experience of somebody who has run a file
 system for a period of time without (for example) a power failure is
 likely to have little to contribute to answer the question on how stable a
 file system is during a power failure.

If I quit using every filesystem type where I have seen data lost, I 
probably wouldn't have a computer any more...  Just assume that there is 
some small risk to every copy of everything.  And that risk will change 
in unpredictable ways with future OS updates too.

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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-25 Thread Adam Goryachev
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My only other comment I forgot to make in my original response, were the
same options enabled for each of the tested filesystems.

Some filesystems by default enable data and metadata journalling, while
others require an option to enable this (AFAIK).

In any case, it sounds like everybody (including me) pretty much agrees
that there probably aren't any good reasons to use reiserfs in a new
installation today.

BTW, specifically related to backuppc, many years ago, reiserfsck was
perfect as it doesn't have any concept or limit on 'inodes'... Same for
mail and news (nntp) servers. Do XFS/JFS have this feature? I'll look
into these things another day, when I have some time :)

Regards,
Adam

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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-25 Thread Adam Goryachev
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On 26/05/11 04:59, Les Mikesell wrote:
 On 5/25/2011 1:46 PM, Michael Stowe wrote:

 I'm really suggesting that the experience of somebody who has run a file
 system for a period of time without (for example) a power failure is
 likely to have little to contribute to answer the question on how stable a
 file system is during a power failure.
 
 If I quit using every filesystem type where I have seen data lost, I 
 probably wouldn't have a computer any more...  Just assume that there is 
 some small risk to every copy of everything.  And that risk will change 
 in unpredictable ways with future OS updates too.

As does the performance of those FS change with each new OS version...

Regards,
Adam

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[BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-24 Thread Marcos Lorenzo de Santiago

Hi everyone,

I'm doing some benchmarks with BackupPC and I wanted to ask 
here about the filesystems you are using and why.


Which one do you think is best for BackupPC?

I saw on the documentation that some users found Reiser is better than 
ext3:


[docu]
Several users have reported significantly better performance using 
reiserfs compared to ext3 for the BackupPC data file system

[/docu]

But I doubt to use ReiserFS as it is no longer being developed or 
updated and I do not know if it's a FS mature enough for production.



Thanks in advance.
Regards.

--

Marcos Lorenzo de Santiago
System administrator
marcos.lore...@andago.com

ÁNDAGO INGENIERÍA
Tlf: +34 916 011 373  Álcalde Ángel Arroyo, 10, 1º
Mvl: +34 637 741 034  28904, Getafe, Madrid (Spain)
Fax: +34 916 011 372   www.andago.com

---
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-- Albert Einstein
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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-24 Thread Sorin Srbu
-Original Message-
From: Marcos Lorenzo de Santiago [mailto:mlore...@andago.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2011 11:53 AM
To: BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

I'm doing some benchmarks with BackupPC and I wanted to ask
here about the filesystems you are using and why.

Which one do you think is best for BackupPC?

When I installed a new BackupPC-server I opted to use ext4, as it at that
time came out-of-the-box with CentOS 5.6. So far, I believe it's performing
much better than ext3 did previously on the older BackupPC-server. Writes
and fsck's run way faster is my subjective feeling.

-- 
/Sorin


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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-24 Thread Michael Stowe

I did a relatively short filesystem comparison when I moved my BackupPC
pool to another set of drives.  The high level results:

jfs, xfs:  quick, stable
reiserfs:  not stable
ext4:  slow
ext3:  very slow

The not stable designation comes from power-off-during-write tests. 
Other filesystems generally handled this gracefully, but reiserfs
corrupted the entire tree, and the recovery tools didn't get it back
intact.

 Hi everyone,

 I'm doing some benchmarks with BackupPC and I wanted to ask
 here about the filesystems you are using and why.

 Which one do you think is best for BackupPC?

 I saw on the documentation that some users found Reiser is better than
 ext3:

 [docu]
 Several users have reported significantly better performance using
 reiserfs compared to ext3 for the BackupPC data file system
 [/docu]

 But I doubt to use ReiserFS as it is no longer being developed or
 updated and I do not know if it's a FS mature enough for production.


 Thanks in advance.
 Regards.

 --

 Marcos Lorenzo de Santiago
 System administrator
 marcos.lore...@andago.com

 ÁNDAGO INGENIERÍA
 Tlf: +34 916 011 373  Álcalde Ángel Arroyo, 10, 1º
 Mvl: +34 637 741 034  28904, Getafe, Madrid (Spain)
 Fax: +34 916 011 372   www.andago.com

 ---
 Dios no juega a los dados con el universo.
  -- Albert Einstein


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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-24 Thread Jeffrey J. Kosowsky
Michael Stowe wrote at about 08:25:35 -0500 on Tuesday, May 24, 2011:
  
  I did a relatively short filesystem comparison when I moved my BackupPC
  pool to another set of drives.  The high level results:
  
  jfs, xfs:  quick, stable
  reiserfs:  not stable
  ext4:  slow
  ext3:  very slow
  

Any idea which particular file operations are causing ext3/4 to be
slow relative to jfs/xfs? Is it reading? writing? linking? listing?
all of the above equally?

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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-24 Thread Tod Detre
On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 5:52 AM, Marcos Lorenzo de Santiago
mlore...@andago.com wrote:

 Which one do you think is best for BackupPC?

One of the main reasons I like xfs is the tool xfs_copy. This will
allow you to copy a backuppc pool filesystem quickly and efficiently.
BackupPC pools have too many hardlinks to make rsync work efficiently.
dd works, but copies all of the empty space too.

-- 
Tod

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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-24 Thread Sorin Srbu
-Original Message-
From: Jeffrey J. Kosowsky [mailto:backu...@kosowsky.org]
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2011 3:59 PM
To: mst...@chicago.us.mensa.org; General list for user discussion,
questions and
support
Subject: Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

Any idea which particular file operations are causing ext3/4 to be
slow relative to jfs/xfs? Is it reading? writing? linking? listing?
all of the above equally?

I found this quick and dirty comparison of file systems. Can it be of some
use for you?

http://maketecheasier.com/choosing-the-best-linux-filesystem/2010/04/13/

-- 
/Sorin


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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-24 Thread Timothy J Massey
Tod Detre tod.de...@maine.edu wrote on 05/24/2011 09:48:07 AM:

 On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 5:52 AM, Marcos Lorenzo de Santiago
 mlore...@andago.com wrote:
 
  Which one do you think is best for BackupPC?
 
 One of the main reasons I like xfs is the tool xfs_copy. This will
 allow you to copy a backuppc pool filesystem quickly and efficiently.
 BackupPC pools have too many hardlinks to make rsync work efficiently.
 dd works, but copies all of the empty space too.

FWIW, partclone is like xfs_copy for all sorts of filesystems:  it 
understands them well enough to copy them without copying empty space.

Timothy J. Massey

 
Out of the Box Solutions, Inc. 
Creative IT Solutions Made Simple!
http://www.OutOfTheBoxSolutions.com
tmas...@obscorp.com 
 
22108 Harper Ave.
St. Clair Shores, MI 48080
Office: (800)750-4OBS (4627)
Cell: (586)945-8796 
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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-24 Thread Marcos Lorenzo de Santiago
yTod Detre tod.de...@maine.edu wrote [9:48am -0400]

   TD  On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 5:52 AM, Marcos Lorenzo de Santiago
   TD  mlore...@andago.com wrote:
   TD  
   TD   Which one do you think is best for BackupPC?
   TD  
   TD  One of the main reasons I like xfs is the tool xfs_copy. This will
   TD  allow you to copy a backuppc pool filesystem quickly and efficiently.
   TD  BackupPC pools have too many hardlinks to make rsync work efficiently.
   TD  dd works, but copies all of the empty space too.

This is one great command! I needed this feature, indeed!

Thanks everyone!

-- 

Marcos Lorenzo de Santiago
System administrator
marcos.lore...@andago.com

ÁNDAGO INGENIERÍA
Tlf: +34 916 011 373  Álcalde Ángel Arroyo, 10, 1º
Mvl: +34 637 741 034  28904, Getafe, Madrid (Spain)
Fax: +34 916 011 372   www.andago.com

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Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

2011-05-24 Thread Michael Stowe
 Michael Stowe wrote at about 08:25:35 -0500 on Tuesday, May 24, 2011:
  
   I did a relatively short filesystem comparison when I moved my BackupPC
   pool to another set of drives.  The high level results:
  
   jfs, xfs:  quick, stable
   reiserfs:  not stable
   ext4:  slow
   ext3:  very slow
  

 Any idea which particular file operations are causing ext3/4 to be
 slow relative to jfs/xfs? Is it reading? writing? linking? listing?
 all of the above equally?

Linking and listing were where the main differences surfaced -- I
speculate it's because xfs and jfs are more efficient at handling
directory entries, but I didn't look into it too deeply -- I didn't do any
special tuning on any of the filesystems.


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