Note: this is my home back up solution.
I have a separate server (Infrant X6 using XRAID on two 250 GB drives)
which mirrors my file server. It's connected to my LAN via Ethernet.
It's set up to turn itself on a 0150, do an rsync of the file server at
0200 and turn itself off at 0600 every day. It also does a scheduled
snapshot of itself every day (5% of the X6's drive space is reserved for
snapshots).
If the file server takes a dump, I can use the X6 as a backup server
till I get the primary server back up.
The rsync is done over NFS, which is painfully slow given the horsepower
limitations of the X6's hardware (and it only supporting NFS over UDP
right now), but it works. Right now each box has only 250 GB of data
space - I'm not backing up the file server's 26 GB OS drive, only it's
data drive.
For home use this works great. the X6 sends me a backup log each night,
and from that I can see that very little data changes on a day-to-day
basis. So performance is not an issue. I may add more drives to the X6
to back up other boxes on my LAN in a similar way.
Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:
I've used Linux's md raid a couple times before, but having suffered a
hard drive death this weekend, I have some questions about performance
and recovery, if anyone's dealt with it.
I'm thinking of getting a pair of 500GB drives, putting one in my Linux
box, and the other in a Firewire case, and setting up a software mirror
between the two. Would this be asking for performance nightmares?
I.e., do writes only return as successful once all mirror copies have
been written, or only when the fastest copy has been written?
Slightly related, how badly does the system suffer when you bring a
mirror up from degraded (i.e., only one drive is present) by replacing
the second drive and doing a rebuild?
For my purposes, would I be better served by just keeping the drive in
the firewire box turned off until I want to do a backup, and then just
use rsync, or will the software mirroring actually do what I want
without torturing the I/O performance because of the firewire mirror?
Thanks,
Gregory
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Best Regards,
~DJA.
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