For most people, a VM is going to make for a much less reliable solution. They
will be way too tempted to put the VM on the same storage as their production
hardware.
For someone who understands the dangers, and has a disaster recovery
replication set up for their VM's already, backup PC either isn't the right
solution for them, or they already have the skills necessary to make such a
solution work.
Why things are different for you in this case, which might have led to the
exhaustion of the list, I'm not sure. But personally, while it might be a good
way to evaluate the software, a VM of backup PC as a supported solution does
not seem like a good idea to me.
Timothy J. Massey
Sent from my iPhone
On Jul 20, 2012, at 6:03 PM, "Bryan Keadle (.net)" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Sorry for the late reply.
>
> anything/everything in a VM is an attraction. :-)
>
> I had hoped for a pre-configured VM appliance so I could easily evaluate it.
> I did not have such an easy implementation experience (as evidenced by
> apparent exhaustion of this listserv during the process). Being able to
> download, "turn on", and make a few modifications to implement in an
> environment is a good way to promote good software. Seems that a VM would
> serve just fine in smaller environments (including home use), and should it
> need to grow beyond the performance capacity of a VM, then one could move to
> a physical solution.
>
> In the case of a S.B.H. event (Smoking Black Bole), that's what I would have
> it configured as an off-site iSCSI target (I have the benefit of dark fiber).
> Similarly, as a VM, I can replicate the BackupPC appliance offsite as well,
> thus my DR site would have all the backups, and a VM copy to mount and use it.
>
> Good to know about rSync - thanks.
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Les Mikesell <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 3:07 PM, Bryan Keadle (.net) <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >
> > I just recently been introduced to BackupPC and I've been pursuing this as a
> > VM appliance to backup non-critical targets. Thus, as a VM, I would use
> > remote storage (iSCSI) to provide capacity instead of local virtual disk.
>
> That can work, but given the ease of apt-get or yum installs on any
> linux system, what's the attraction of a VM? You'll get a lot of
> overhead for not much gain. And if you end up sharing physical media
> with the source targets, you shouldn't even call it a backup.
>
> > Les - as for the offsite copies of the archive, you're speaking of a backup
> > of the backup. For the purpose that BackupPC provides, non-critical data,
> > I'm not so concerned with backing up the backup.
>
> What's your plan for a building disaster? If it is 'collect the
> insurance and retire' then you probably don't care about offsite
> copies...
>
> > However, should BackupPC
> > start holding backups that I would need redundancy for, what do you
> > recommend? What are you doing? Since I'm thinking SAN-based storage for
> > BackupPC, I figured I would just use SAN-based replication.
>
> If you aren't sharing the media with the data you are trying to
> protect, that would work. But, if you have the site-to-site
> bandwidth for that, it would be much cheaper to just run the backups
> over rsync from a backuppc server at the opposite site. I have
> mostly converted to that approach now, but an older setup that is
> still running has a 3-member RAID1 where one of the drives is swapped
> out and re-synced weekly. These were initially full sized 750 Gig
> drives, but I'm using a laptop size WD (BLACK - the BLUE version is
> too slow...) for the offsite members now. Other people do something
> similar with LVM mirrors or snapshot image copies.
>
> > But should that
> > not be wise or available, would you just stand up an rSync target and just
> > rSync /var/lib/BackupPC to some offisite target?
>
> The number of hardlinks in a typical backuppc archive make that a
> problem or impossible at some point because rsync has to track and
> reproduce them by inode number, keeping the whole table in memory.
> I think a zfs snapshot with incremental send/receive might work, but
> you'd need freebsd or solaris instead of linux for that.
>
> --
> Les Mikesell
> [email protected]
>
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Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and
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