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Notes on migrating to bigger storage. Two weeks ago I asked about migrating to my BackupPC pool to bigger storage. I got a number of responses and after some experimentation reached the following conclusions: Suggestions: 1) dd the filesystem then expand it on the new storage. It's fast with a good network you can max disk. Copying on the same machine I was bus limited at ~40MB/sec. This is probably the best approach *if* you can expand your filesystems. However it turns out that growfs on FreeBSD is less than reliable with very large filesystems (in my case it refused to grow a 600GB filesystem to 1TB exiting with an error about seeking to a negative block number) Your experience may vary depending on OS but you are strongly advised to test it first. 2) cp, pax, tar, rsync et al. All of the file copy programs have severe limitations when dealing with BackupPC pools. The initial copy file by file is slow (~ 1/3 to 1/4 of the dd copy speed) but the subsequent creation of the hard linked backup trees for each client is painfuly slow. I aborted my copy after three days with less than 25% of the files linked. 3) Dump/restore – this has the potential to work well *if* you have a lot of memory in the machine – the restore process on my machine ran out of memory (I only have 1GB in the box) 4) Don’t bother. This is the approach I finally chose – I decided to just create a new server and let it start backing up hosts and at the same time turn off the old server but keep that data until I have a cycle with at least two full backups for each host. A hybrid approach using this and pax/cp/tar should also be possible copying only the pool. Turning off the nightly cleanup jobs and running a full backup to create new backup tress linked to the pool then once that has run re-enabling nightly clean up. Other data points – The Box is an old slow Celeron 2.93 Ghz box with 1GB ram and a highpoint raid card with 6 WD250 IDE drives running FreeBSD 6.2. BackupPC version is 3.0beta3. Backup pool is ~ 300GB and contains uses 9 million inodes. File systems are ufs2 with soft-updates enabled. John |
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