>> Whatever happens it has to go straight to the NFS as that's the only
>> storage>> I'll have that's big enough to take anything.>> Big disks are
>> cheap these days. Or use one part of the NFS share for> backuppc, another
>> for what you send to tape.
Echo Les, what he said.
You will find your BackupPC instance will come in very handy for
ad-hoc restores, and its deduping will allow you to keep versioning
archives long-term.
But IMO don't bother having them backup the whole TopDir, or if you do
try that, treat it as a completely separate run of the tape system,
separate physical tape sets etc, it's just "would be nice if it works"
ie "we might be able to reconstruct the BackupPC instance from tape
but won't count on it."
Set up a secondary mount point (let's call it DumpDir) for scheduled
"dump to tape" jobs per client/target host - those are the targets for
your tape jobs. This means the tape archive process won't benefit from
BPC's de-duplication, but speed/ease of recovery in a true disaster is
the goal there not saving media space. These are temporary dumps, have
your process deleted when the next dump runs.
Note that this TopDir filesystem, although it in effect will contain
the contents of hundreds of DumpDir instances down the road, will
actually take up a very small fraction of your allocated actual disk
space, depending on #hosts and degree of duplication between them. Be
very careful you don't allow your total space to fill up - ideally you
want TopDir on its own dedicated filesystem. Otherwise perhaps keep
more than one instance per host in your DumpDir, so you can quickly
wipe them out when your monitoring system let's you know you're
hitting the say 80% threshold, giving your team time to fulfill your
request for more disk space.
As you seem to be aware, the lack of an overall centrally coordinated
plan by a BackupPC expert means you'll end up with a bit of a
square-peg-round-hole end result, but if the resources are there to
accommodate the resulting hodgepodge, the result can still be
reliable; in fact it will result in resource-inefficient redundancy
that might just come in handy down the road 8-)
If it turns out the filesystem you're allocated is too precious for
them to be able to accommodate the above, then make sure you put the
BackupPC TopDir on the most reliable and expandable filesystem
(probably the expensive one) and just use a big cheap drive for the
"scratch" DumpDir filesystem targeted by their tape system.
Disclaimer - above is based on background knowledge from general
experience, if it conflicts with what anyone else tells you here
regarding BackupPC, best to follow them rather than me.
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