Saturn2888 wrote:
> I've seen so many things on the mailing list. I don't know how to respond, 
> what program to use if any, if there's some special way to keep track. Think 
> of if you've never come across a forum before. Someone would have to teach 
> you how to use it. This is the same thing. Pointing me to where a bunch of 
> mail-list links are wouldn't help because I already know about that. Instead 
> of mail list, let's call it Communication Method X. If you speak to me about 
> getting or writing to Communication Method X, how would I know what that 
> means? Sure you can point me to links I can click on, but there's no 
> information on it. It's like saying "just post it in the forums" but not 
> telling me I need a user/pass and that after getting in you post topics or 
> replies to topics already made by other people and have discussions about 
> that topic while also lacking the explanation of the fundamentals of threads 
> and posts and different methods of viewing and managing them.

It is hard to imagine someone having enough computers that they are a problem 
to 
back up not having an email account, but OK. Starting from the beginning, if 
your ISP doesn't provide an account, you can get free ones at www.gmail.com, 
www.ymail.com, www.hotmail.com, etc.  Once you have an email address, put it in 
the form at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users and 
then 
reply to the email confirmation it sends.  Mail lists are pretty much all 
alike, 
so this etiquette page is as good as any: 
http://www.samba.org/samba/ml-etiquette.html.

> Hmm... For my RAID5 setups, I've always ended up with the speed of one drive 
> or more, not less than one drive.

That's if you measure large writes where the extra work for a partial block 
doesn't make a big difference.  With backuppc you are mostly doing small writes 
making directory trees and hard links that will update an inode.


> On my main rig using Intel ICH10R, I'm able to get close to 200MB/s using 5 
> hard drives. If each drive can write consistently at 75MB/s, I'm writing 53% 
> of the total continuous write capacity whereas you're trying to explain that 
> it's completely for me to even get anywhere from 5-20MB/s (under 10%) write 
> speed using RAID5 with the same or faster drives because of some massive 
> overhead.

You are measuring big continuous writes.  Backuppc rarely does that.

> I'll try to get a hold of more memory within the next month then. I believe I 
> could probably switch out what I have in other machines and try. I only saw, 
> at most, 6MB of swap used, but I always figured it's a good idea to have a 
> swap partition. I always thought it would be used, but my RAM usually is 
> normally around 380MB which is why I've never felt like I needed more RAM.

Having some unused code swapped out isn't a problem - but if you are actively 
swapping in and out you will slow down a lot.  Almost all of your free RAM will 
be used for filesystem buffering so more will eliminate the need for a lot of 
seeks/reads with head contention for the writes.

> Ah yes, is the compression something that happens during the backup or after?

Compression happens after, but only on the first instance for each file - 
additional copies are matched and replaced with links.  And backuppc does some 
tricky stuff to avoid writing smaller files to disk at all if it can do the 
pool 
match in memory.

> I have no problems using smbclient or file managers in Windows. The files 
> disappearing happened only after continued use.

That doesn't make any sense. If smbclient/smbtar could read the file you would 
have had it.

> Another issue has come up just recently. A machine has been in standby since 
> before this server came back online and both the virtual machine on that 
> server and the server OS itself are both reported as failed backups when they 
> should have been shown as having no ping.

I haven't seen that before.

 > Since transitioning to my 2TB drive, I've also noticed the pool information 
vanished. My pool filesystem grew last night from 18% to 23% usage. That means 
an extra 100GB of files appeared. I think something is wrong. Is there a way to 
fix this?

Did you mount the new volume or symlink it in the expected place.  You can't 
move TOPDIR after installation.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com




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