I too am using ZFS, and I can honestly say that ZFS works great, up to a point. rsync does seem to take up an inordinate amount of resources, but in a smaller shop like mine, it's been tolerable. I think it would work in a larger shop too, but the system resource requirements (CPU/RAM) would grow larger than what you would expect normally. I've had a couple of instances of performance issues in my setup, where over time, rsync was uploading data to the system faster than zfs could process it, and so I'd watch my load go through the roof (8.00+ on a quad core system), and I would have to stop BackupPC for an hour or so, so that ZFS could catch up, but other than that, this system has actually handled it fairly well.
What I really like about ZFS though, is the deduplication coupled with compression. I've disabled compression in BackupPC to allow ZFS to properly do the dedup & compression (enabling compression in BackupPC kills ZFS' dedup ability, since it messes with the checksums of the files), and I'm getting numbers in the range of 4.xx deduplication. My ZFS array is 1.12TB in size, yet, according to BackupPC, I've got 1800GB in fulls, and 2400GB in incrementals. When I query the array for actual disk usage, it says I'm using 557GB of space... Now that's just too cool. Thanks, --Mark -----Original Message----- From: Tim Connors [mailto:tconn...@rather.puzzling.org] Sent: Monday, December 16, 2013 10:00 PM To: General list for user discussion, questions and support Subject: Re: [BackupPC-users] What file system do you use? On Mon, 16 Dec 2013, Timothy J Massey wrote: > One last thing: everyone who uses ZFS raves about it. But seeing as > (on > Linux) you're limited to either FUSE or out-of-tree kernel modules (of > questionable legality: ZFS' CDDL license is *not* GPL compatible), > it's not my first choice for a backup server, either. I am using it, and it sucks for a backuppc load (in fact, from the mailing list, it is currently (and has been for a couple of years) terrible on an rsync style workload - any metadata heavy workload will eventually crash the machine after a couple of weeks uptime. Some patches are being tested right now out of tree that look promising, but I won't be testing them myself until it hits master 0.6.3. Problem for me is that it takes about a month to migrate to a new filesystem. I migrated to zfs a couple of years ago with insufficient testing. I should have kept on ext4+mdadm (XFS was terrible too - no faster than ext4, and given that I've always lost data on various systems with it because it's such a flaky filesystem, I wasn't gaining anything). mdadm is more flexible than ZFS, although harder to configure. With mdadm+ext4, you can choose any disk arrangement you like without being limited to simple RAID-Z(n) arrangements of equal sized disks. That said, I do prefer ZFS's scrubbing compared to mdadm's, but only slightly. If I was starting from scratch and didn't have 4-5 years of backup archives, I'd tell backuppc to turn off compression and munging of the pool, and let ZFS do it. I used JFS 10 years ago, and "niche buggy product" would be my description for it. Basically, go with the well tested popular FSs, because they're not as bad as everyone makes them out to be. -- Tim Connors ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, & PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Rapidly troubleshoot problems before they affect your business. Most IT organizations don't have a clear picture of how application performance affects their revenue. With AppDynamics, you get 100% visibility into your Java,.NET, & PHP application. Start your 15-day FREE TRIAL of AppDynamics Pro! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=84349831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
