Backup Server - Partitions (and other questions)

gogi-goji · 2010-08-23 19:50:53

In light of the recent hard drive failure in my mum's iMac, I realized that there is a large amount of data on both my machine and other computers in our house that is not backed up. I had access to an old-ish computer (from 2002 or so), and I figured that it would make a great backup server for all of our household files. (In the past, it had heat issues when the cpu heatsink fell off, but I stuck it back on and taped a couple of fans in place inside the machine to facilitate more airflow.)

My main question is how I should partition the hard drives. As for hard drives, I have three bays, filled with an old 200GB drive (IDE), a brand new 1TB drive (SATA), and a 500GB drive (SATA). I really have no idea where the 500GB drive came from, and I'm uncertain as to how reliable it will be. What kind of partition scheme should I be looking at, and what filesystem(s) should I use? I'm leaning towards ext3 or XFS, but I've heard stuff about ext3 having the potential for data loss and XFS is fairly unproven, at least from what I've heard.

The computers that I want to back up onto this machine include my mum's mac, my linux machine (with 300GB+ of flac music files), my sister's linux machine, and potentially my linux netbook and my dad's windows netbook. I was looking at rsnapshot and Link-Backup (http://scottlu.com/Content/Link-Backup.html, in the AUR with some patches), but leaning towards the latter option because it "... intelligently handles renames, moves, and duplicate files without additional storage or transfer." I was thinking of having the server pull files from the desktop machines over SSHFS or NFS, but really, I don't know what I'm doing so any advice is appreciated. I don't know how or if I should approach backing up the netbooks.

In short, I want to back up a bunch of my family's computers and don't know how I should go about doing so, so I'm open to suggestions. Thanks.

karol · 2010-08-23 20:03:45

XFS is fairly unproven, you say? If you back up multiGB multimedia files it will suit you well, but if you want to back up millions of small files it will be a nightmare.
Using an 8yo computer with a bunch of taped-in fans as a safe place for your files doesn't sound quite right.
If you need to back up some movies, music, photos and documents, ext4 should be OK.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup
You should pick whats doable in your situation and not pretend you're e.g. Google and you need enterprise-grade backup solution. A backup done once a week is better than nothing, but a daily backup is even better. It all depends on how much data needs to be backed up and how often - how often you precious data changes? If you constantly edit all your flac files an incremental backup doesn't make much sense.

I've heard some Windows notebooks/netbooks come with cloud storage, so you may use that too.

As for partition scheme - JBOD and /home/mum, /home/sis, /home/dad and /home/me are as good as any other. Whose data lies on which drive depends on the storage needs.

Last edited by karol (2010-08-23 20:13:37)

fukawi2 · 2010-08-23 23:42:36

gogi-goji wrote:

I'm leaning towards ext3 or XFS, but I've heard stuff about ext3 having the potential for data loss and XFS is fairly unproven, at least from what I've heard.

ext3 is about as safe as you can get without chiselling the bits of your files into stone tablets.

karol wrote:

Using an 8yo computer with a bunch of taped-in fans as a safe place for your files doesn't sound quite right.

+1

And use LVM between the disks and the filesystem. It makes life so much easier.

gogi-goji · 2010-08-24 04:26:01

I understand and even share that sentiment about the sketchiness of using this computer for my backups. I do plan on migrating the system to something less sketchy when I can get a hold of a more reliable machine, but until then, this is the only extra machine I have available. I am pretty confident that it will hold up, though, and will be both monitoring it and setting up a system to alert me and shut the machine down if it does overheat.

My music directory is definitely the most valuable data I have. I don't reorganize, edit, or move files too often, but it still happens. I was leaning towards Link-Backup so that I could make backups nightly, say, while still keeping storage usage down. That way I'd always have a recent backup with minimal disk usage.

fukawi2: When you say "use LVM between the disks and the filesystem", do you mean just make one big partition that spans over multiple physical disks? I'm just unsure as to what you mean.

fukawi2 · 2010-08-24 05:10:08

Use LVM to make one big 1700gb "Volume Group" then assign that as needed. If you only have 750gb of data to backup at the moment, then only assign say 800 - 900gb to a "Logical Volume".

It will make it SO much easier in the future to say add a new 1tb disk, remove the 500 and 200, and not have to move backups around, recreate backups etc.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-08-23 19:50:53

Backup Server - Partitions (and other questions)

#2 2010-08-23 20:03:45

Re: Backup Server - Partitions (and other questions)

#3 2010-08-23 23:42:36

Re: Backup Server - Partitions (and other questions)

#4 2010-08-24 04:26:01

Re: Backup Server - Partitions (and other questions)

#5 2010-08-24 05:10:08

Re: Backup Server - Partitions (and other questions)

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