On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 12:37 AM, Craig Ringer
<craig AT postnewspapers.com DOT au> wrote:

[snip]

>
> Is this insane? Or a viable approach to tackling some of the
> complexities of faking tape backup on disk as Bacula currently tries to do?
>

I love Bacula and have been working hard to promote it to people I
know. The biggest problem with bacula is it's disk management. We have
a DataDomain box that is getting horrible dedup rate and after looking
at the Bacula tape stream format, I can understand why. There is so
much extra data inserted into the stream that is very helpful for tape
drives that it makes deduping the data nearly impossible.

I would love to see the stream simplified for disk based storage.
Another thing I'd like the option for is to be able to specify a block
size and start a file on the block boundry, you could use sparse files
to skip the space without taking it up. This would allow dedup
algorithms to really be able to compress Bacula data much better. It
would be awesome if the file stored in the Bacula stream looked
exactly like on the file systm so that if you do any tier 3 storage
with dedup and run your Bacula backups to the same storage, you get
free backups.

Dedup is gaining a lot of traction, name your favorite vendor, or as
I'm doing look at lessfs. All of these would benefit hugely from a
smart SD that knows how to handle disk storage better and make Bacula
much more attractive. With the types of backups we are doing, we
should be getting 10x easy on our DataDomain, but we are lucky to get
4x and I think that mostly comes from compression.

Thanks,

Robert LeBlanc
Life Sciences & Undergraduate Education Computer Support
Brigham Young University

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