Hi there, On Sat, 6 Mar 2021, John Botha (SourceForge) wrote:
... take the plunge with BackupPC, ... bit rot protection is key ... ... ... fragmentation ... how best to approach this with a combination of rebalancing and scrubbing, or if there is another way or other aspects to keep in mind. ... ... I thought it would be safest to use nodatacow, but then read that doing so would also stop bit rot protection, so that's a real bummer. Am I missing something, or do I have that right? ... ... have btrfs handle de/compression, as that would seem to involve less time doing redundant calculations. Does that make sense? ... ... seen some flame wars around the use of btrfs.
I don't want to add fuel to any flames. In my view you're making it more difficult for yourself than you need to (or indeed should do) if you're just starting out with BackupPC. My take on it is that you will have quite enough on your plate getting BackupPC bedded down - so it's doing what you want in your particular circumstances, and you're comfortable with that - without adding into the mix a whole bunch of variables which don't need to be variables. If 'bit rot' protection is key to you, then set up BackupPC to avoid any possibility of it happening, spend a few months (or perhaps years) making sure that it isn't happening, and worry about filesystem(s), and any quirks they may have, some other time. I personally have never seen any evidence of what I imagine might be called 'bit rot' because in my view if something like that's happening then the system is badly broken and it needs fixing. But I have seen plenty of damaged filesystems. When I have had experience of damaged filesystems, I believe it's fair to say that the newer the filesystem, the more difficult it has been to repair it. The first (and last!!!) ReiserFS I ever used failed catastrophically and was never recovered. I've recovered everything from DOS to EXT/2/3/4 systems, usually with little difficulty; I've never used BTRFS so I can't offer any comment on its repairability. Right now I use EXT4 almost exclusively, and there would have to be a really technologically disruptive development in filesystem capability (like an order of magnitude improvement in some performance metric) to encourage me even to consider changing to anything else. I don't care if anybody thinks I'm an old stick-in-the-mud, I just want it to work. The other day when I was out with one of my dogs I fell into chatting with a couple of other walkers. This particular dog is a difficult case from the rescue. One of the walkers said "you seem to have a calm aura about you". Of course that's necessary for these difficult rescue cases. I thanked her for the compliment although I didn't say "it's because I use BackupPC and EXT4" - which wouldn't have been too far from the truth. -- 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/
