> A little more about my setup: > 4 machines, 3 winxp pro heavily loaded for video graphics work mostly > with nearly all the main adobe tools. The fourth machine is my linux > desktop which doesn't figure large in the video work but is on gigabit > ethernet with the others. And would not really need to be involved in > the bacula work. Relying on rsnapshot for the linux os and small > amount of other data. > > What ever I finally end up backing up with, it would most likely be to > disk not tape just for the simplicity and availablitity. > > You mentioned raid5. I've been meaning to study up on the different > raid setups but currently know zero about it. Why raid5? Is it > particulary well suited in some way?
Raid5 adds a layer of redundancy to your system. It works by striping data and parity over multiple disks (thus losing an entire disk because of this and some CPU power if going with software raid, but soft/hard is another discussion). This parity striping makes it able to seemlessly recover itself after a single disk failure in the array of disks. Because of this writing/reading to multiple disks at the same time it can handle high streaming speeds (very suitable for large video files). Because of this speed and built-in redundancy Arno recommended it (as would I :-) Furthermore usefull info about all the raid levels is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks As Arno said, it all depends upon your needs and network infrastructure. But it would appear to me that a (vendor or home built) raid5 solution would be just fine since raid5 has it's biggest bottleneck in small transactions (as would occur in databases), which you don't have. > > A typical kind of need I would have would be during a project to have > daily full backup and maybe 4hr incrementals or something along that > line. That would pile up a hefty amount of data very soon so maybe > not quite that intense but close. Depends upon the work you generate daily offcourse and wheter you "change" existing files alot. > > I do plan to either buy prebuilt/configured NAS which could be the > destination or create a linux home NAS with gentoo linux running as > many SATA discs as one OS can muster ... well something like 6-8 I > guess giving about 1 terabyte of space. That would not all be bacula > destination of coures but would be holding all kinds of source > material etc. > As you allready have about 1TB (those 4 250GB drives), you'd better aim for a lot more storage. > Long as we are at it maybe you have some suggestions about the NAS > stuff too. I'm looking at this chart: > > http://www.tomsnetworking.com/nas/charts/index.html?chart=135 > > and thinking the Thecus setup is so much faster than any of the > rest... I may shoot for that at some point but for now just beef up my > linux desktop with a PCI sata controller and several large sata > drives. Indeed, a custom built box (550Watt PSU, 2 x Promise SATA cards with 4 connections) should be able to handle 3TB at least for quite a low cost. However... concerning business continuity and disaster recovery I wouldn't recommend backing up only to disk (especially not on the same site). At some point you'd have to do a media copy to another external disk or tape manually (or monthly i.e.) Concerning NAS, it isn't mentioned in the NAS charts, but I've had good experiences with NetApp's NAS/SAN appliances...but they tend to be quite expensive. When going to a NetApp solution you could use it's snapshot technology for your disk backups and then let bacula (or a simple tar script for that usage) dump it to tape/ext disk every once and a while. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
