Hi there,
On Wed, 18 Nov 2020, Kenneth Porter wrote:
I'm advising a friend on what to use to back up his networked
Windows PCs (including one Windows Server) in a machine shop. I
deploy BackupPC at home and at my own office on CentOS servers, but
this shop has no technical people and no Linux machines. I'm
wondering if anyone has bundled BackupPC into, say, a Raspberry Pi
as a "backup appliance". Or is there some other product I should be
looking at?
I've been using BackupPC on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ for a couple of years
to back up up my own office systems (all Linux boxes) and I've used
BackupPC to back up multiple Windows/Linux servers and workstations
for clients, including some with machine/fabrication shops, for almost
two decades. I routinely monitor the status of the backup servers and
many of the other servers and clients, using Nagios and/or Icinga and
Smokeping, so I get email alerts if something drops off the network.
For remote backup systems I use OpenVPN to get access through client
firewalls.
FWIW, I can say that after getting over hiccups in the systems' setups
they have been extremely reliable. The Pi 3B+ on my desk (mostly used
as a thin client and for backup) is currently at 237 days uptime. I'd
recommend them without hesitation for backing up anything up to a few
dozen machines and at least tens of terabytes of total backup storage.
I couldn't offer an opinion on anything much larger as I don't have
personal experience of large systems but I wouldn't expect issues with
storage of hundreds of terabytes of data - even using Pi 3B+ - if the
network infrastructure will support it. You'd want at least gigabit
Ethernet, which might be something to consider if the machine shop
installation is very old. After I upgraded the network for a client
(a fab shop), every now and then we'd suddenly run into connectivity
issues when somebody cleared out a desk and found an old switch (or
hub!) which was only capable of 10 or 100 MBit/s, and patched it into
the network without asking. And once upon a time the site electrician
juggled most of the patch cables in the server cabinet because he'd
had a row with the site foreman but that was really exceptional. The
cheaper switches (Netgear and TP-Link) have given trouble - they would
work fine for weeks and then suddenly start chattering away to nothing
that I could ever find and ignore all legitimate traffic until a power
cycle fixed them - but it seems that only a couple of examples out of
dozens that I installed ever did that, and they've been replaced.
The Pi 4B irregularly crashes for no apparent reason, the 3B+ doesn't.
So I wouldn't recommend the 4B (not *any* 4B version) for anything as
important as backup (nor for anything in or near a machine shop where
frequent power spikes could be expected). I run three on my own site,
24/365. They seem to struggle to get past ten days of uptime, but it
isn't really an issue for the jobs they're doing. I don't think the
USB port design is quite right yet. Sometimes they'll just lose the
ports altogether and you have to reboot to recover them. It's a pain
because the hard discs are USB connected of course. This will sound
weird, I know, but there seems to be something bi-stable about them.
Once they're going OK they seem to keep going for a while. But after
a crash, it seems to take anything up to a dozen reboots over a period
of perhaps a couple of days before they settle down to give reasonable
reliability - until the next crash. I've been working with electronic
kit for more than half a century, so I'm conscious that sounds crazy
and I know there's still something I'm missing. I'll find it one day
unless they bring out a better 4B and these go in the parts bin.
I can let you have screenshots and such if you'd like to see them and
I'll be happy to help more if required. If you'd like to discuss it
privately please drop me a line on the list and I can let you have a
private email address - my list address accepts only list mail - or
just send a message to this address and live with the rejection, I'll
most likely see your mail in the logs because I spend most of my life
reading them.
HTH
--
73,
Ged.
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