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. _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
