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Re: [BackupPC-users] How scalable is backuppc?
2009-04-04 20:23:45
Unfortunately filesystems tend to be OS specific. Even when some support is brought into a different OS it is rarely a choice filesystem. EXT2/3 is usable in windows and freebsd but one would never want to store data in windows on an ext3 volume. NTFS is usable on linux but certainly is not a filesystem for production systems. Im not saying that no filesystem is cross platform, but *bsd is UFS and linux is ext3 and windows is NTFS. you could pull up stats that showed that each of these filesystems is the one used on 80+% of the respective systems out there.
The point is that Linux doesnt yet have a great filesystem for workloads like backuppc. some are coming like ext4 and btrfs but ext4 is hardly stable enough for production environments and btrfs isnt stable for test systems. XFS is a port, and I dont think that it has the attention required to be a grade-A linux filesystem. same goes for JFS.
AdvFS from Tru64/DUX is a fabulous filesystem but it doesnt look like its going to be worked into Linux anytime soon(it is GPL now). I know it is an old filesystem but is really top of the line.
ZFS is great on slowlaris but sucks on freebsd and sucks more on linux with fuse. Solaris needs much better hardware support to be viable as a primary platform for backuppc.
I have done tons of testing on various platforms. I started on ubuntu and ext3 and have ended with ubuntu on ext3. not because other systems didnt have strong points but because nothing seems to match a basic linux install with a strong and trustable filesystem like ext3.
I would sure like to see ZFS ported to linux for real and/or Reiserfs come back to life for real. Back in the ricer days (gentoo if you didnt get that) I used reiserfs exclusively as it smoked everything else for the workloads I was using. Reiserfs also seems to be nice and fast for backuppc but without a strong dev team to fix bugs that come up I have to stick with ext3.
On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Dan Pritts <danno AT internet2 DOT edu> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 05:17:01PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > Why not? :o) As long as it can continue to access the XFS volume I
> > have (for the month until my current backups would "time out"), I'm game.
>
> I don't think that's possible - at least in a way that I'd trust. You'd
> need to run solaris, opensolaris, or freebsd for zfs and I don't think
> they do xfs natively. There'd be some chance of running one or the
> other under VMware server or virtualbox with native access to the device
> (assuming both have drivers and they don't conflict), but even that
> sounds risky.
for the record, supposedly freebsd can read XFS:
http://people.freebsd.org/~rodrigc/xfs/
i'd keep my linux installation running, though.
danno
--
Dan Pritts, Sr. Systems Engineer
Internet2
office: +1-734-352-4953 | mobile: +1-734-834-7224
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