On 23/12/2021 16:56, Mark Knecht wrote:
Rich & Wols,
Thanks for the responses. I'll post a single response here. I had
thought of the need to mirror the ZIL but didn't have enough physical
disk slots in the backup machine for the 2nd SSD. I do think this is a
critical point if I was to use the ZIL at all.
Okay, how heavily are you going to hammer the server writing to it? If
you aren't going to stress it, don't bother with the ZIL.
Based on inputs from the two of you I'm investigating a different
overall setup for my home network:
Previously - a new main desktop that holds all my data. Lots of disk
space, lots of data. All of my big data work - audio recording
sessions and astrophotography - are done on this machine. Two
__backup__ machines. Desktop machines are backed up to machine 1,
machine 1 backed up to machine 2, machine 2 eventually backed up to
some cloud service.
Now - a new desktop machine that holds audio recording data currently
being recorded and used due to real-time latency requirements.
Sounds good...
< Two new
network machines: Machine 1 would be both a backup machine as well as
a file server. The file server portion of this machine holds
astrophotography data and recorded video files. PixInsight running on
my desktop accesses and stores over the network to machine 1. Instead
of a ZIL in machine 1 the SSD becomes a ZLOG cache most likely holding
a cached copy of the currently active astrophotography projects.
Actually, it sounds like the best use of the SSD would be your working
directory in your desktop.
Machine 1 may also run a couple of VMs over time.
Whatever :-) Just make sure that it's easy to back up! I'd be inclined
to have a bunch of raid-5'd disks ...
Machine 2 is a pure
backup machine of everything on Machine 1.
I'd say don't waste your money. You don't need a *third* machine. Spend
the money on some large disk drives, an eSATA card for machine 1, and a
hard disk docking station ...
FYI - Machine 1 will always be located close to my desktop machines
and use the 1Gb/S wired network. iperf suggests I get about 850Mb/S on
and off of Machine 1. Machine 2 will be remote and generally backed up
overnight using wireless.
As always I'm interested in your comments about what works or
doesn't work about this sort of setup.
My main desktop/server currently has two 4TB drives split 1TB/3TB. The
two 3TB partitions are raid-5'd with a 3TB drive to give me 6TB of /home
space.
I'm planning to buy an 8TB drive as a backup. The plan is it will go
into a test-bed machine, that will be used for all sorts of stuff, but
it will at least keep a copy of my data off my main machine.
But you get the idea. If you get two spare drives you can back up on to
them. I don't know what facilities ZFS offers for sync'ing filesystems,
but if you're go somewhere regularly, where you can stash a hard disk
(even a shed down the bottom of the garden :-), you back up onto disk 1,
swap it for disk 2, back up on to disk 1, swap it for disk 2 ...
AND YOUR BACKUP IS OFF SITE!
Cheers,
Wol
