[OpenAFS] Re: Preferred way to do backup?

[Dan Pritts]

> Don't forget Stephen Joyce's "BackupAFS". I haven't used it, but I =
think
> it's worth mentioning as one of the few backup systems that is =
actively
> paying attention to AFS.

We use it (the older version called BackupPC4AFS, we need to upgrade) =
and it works well for us.

We have a small cell with a single fileserver and < 2TB of data. =20

I think its scalability will be limited by the I/O bandwidth between =
your fileservers and your backup server(s).  There's no reason you =
couldn't have multiple backupAFS servers, they each just would have a =
different set of volumes to back up.

We also use BackupPC (software on which Stephen based BackupAFS). =20

BackupPC's major failing and its major feature is that it performs =
file-level de-duplication by making hard links to a central data pool. =20=


The rest of BackupPC is a reasonable web-gui shell around this backup =
archive.  Stephen reused this portion and i think it' ought to scale =
pretty well.

fwiw i say it's a feature, because it works great. =20

i say it's a failing, because you end up with zillions of hard links in =
your filesystem. =20

This means:

there is no good way to duplicate your backupPC archive.  We dd =
filesystem images to another set of disks and offsite them.

restores of a lot of systems all at once will be awfully slow, since =
your disks have to seek all over the place.

danno
--
Dan Pritts, Sr. Systems Engineer
Internet2
office: +1-734-352-4953 | mobile: +1-734-834-7224