Re: [Bacula-users] efficient disk backups

Gavin,

Not all data is created equal. You might classify data which is super important and changes often - it needs a lot of care and feeding. It is also data which needs redundancy in backup hardware. Mail tends to be like that. People get a message, read it and then delete it. The next day they go looking for it. Even a daily backup may not catch the message if the user deleted the message withing the day.

Then there is data which does not change often, lingers around for a long time, like user files. And we can be more sloppy with safeguarding it. Meaning, if the backup lives on a cheap RAID 0 array (e-sata array), and the whole array goes south. You can start another backup in the background and hope in the mean time the original stays stable - you can recover.

Bacula allows you to have multiple storage locations, each running a sd. This divorcing of one type of data from another has other benefits - similar to having multiple smaller volumes versus a few big ones. If one volume gets corrupted, it affects a smaller set of data. Spend the money where you really need to spend it.

Yudhvir
===

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 4:04 AM, Gavin McCullagh <gavin.mccullagh AT gcd DOT ie> wrote:

One server has about 300GB of data. We keep 31 consecutive days and the 1st
of each month prior to that. This costs us about 450GB of disk space.

I'm now looking at setting up bacula for this backup -- initially using
disk storage. As a starting point, looking at chapter 25 of the manual, it
would cost about (300GB*6)*(compression ratio) just for the full backups
which is a little rough and probably involves a very large amount of
redundancy. While SATA disks are pretty cheap, caddies for our Dell MD1000
disk array aren't :-(

To try and reduce the space requirements, I'm considering more spread out
schemes ...

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