"Tim Chipman" <tchipman AT gmail DOT com> wrote on 01/10/2009 08:35:57 PM:
> Context: Small office site (daycare) with 4 windows workstations,
> approx 50gigs of data to backup in total across all machines, and slow
> incremental growth expected on disk footprint over next 3-5 years.
OK.
> Intent: I have a generic whitebox PC P3-933 with 512mb ram, into which
> I'll put a PCI sata card, and then attach 2 x 1 Tb Seagate Sata
> drives. On top of this, install CentOS 5.2/32bit and then do software
> raid-1 mirror on the 2 volumes, so I expect to have ~900gigs of usable
> space for the backupPC slice. The disk is "over capacity" because
> they want to have room for this server for a ~5 year lifespan, and
> given current disk prices, it makes little sense to get anything
> smaller than 1 Tb drives, I think.
I would agree.
> The LAN connecting these systems is vanilla 100mb ether, although
> upgrade to gig-ether is possible - but I'm not sure it really is
> merited. Obvious would put a gig-ether nic the backupPC box if this
> was to happen.
100Mb is fine.
> Backup plan, would be to do monthly full and nightly incrementals, or
> something like that. Possibly 2 concurrent sessions, although with so
> few clients it really doesn't matter much I think.
There's really no reason not to do weekly fulls. The amount of data is so
small, it won't hurt *anything*.
> So - the basic question: Should I expect BackupPC to run smoothly on
> hardware of this vintage ?
Certainly.
> Will it suffer too much from a low-power
> CPU ? Would it run significantly smoother on something less ancient (I
> might be able to get a P4-2ghz system for this role, for example).
Assuming no compression, it will do *just* fine. I never use compression
on my backups, and given your 1TB capacity, why would you?
My standard BackupPC server is a 1.5GHz Via EPIA EN (which is *easily*
slower than a ~1GHz PIII), 512MB RAM, and a single PATA or SATA hard
drive. Don't let others tell you you need more RAM: I've got servers
with more than half a million files and I use exactly zero swap with 512MB
RAM. Nor will you need more CPU: I usually have 30% or more in
"waiting", meaning that I am *not* CPU bound.
I've got backup servers that back up multiple servers that total more than
500GB of data between them (200GB, 250GB and a few other servers in the
20GB range). I've also got other servers that back up servers that only
have 50GB of data, but have daily incremental backups of 50GB (*plus*
backing up other servers, too!). All of them work fine with the above
hardware.
Tim Massey
