BackupPC-users

Re: [BackupPC-users] moving per-pc log files

2012-01-21 10:23:38
Subject: Re: [BackupPC-users] moving per-pc log files
From: Till Hofmann <hofmanntill AT googlemail DOT com>
To: "General list for user discussion, questions and support" <backuppc-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net>
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:21:32 +0100
On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 8:58 PM, Jeffrey J. Kosowsky <backuppc AT kosowsky DOT org> wrote:
Till Hofmann wrote at about 16:23:56 +0100 on Friday, January 20, 2012:
 > Hello everybody,
 >
 > since my backup partition is on a RAID5 which doesn't do anything but
 > keeping my backups, I want the hard drives to automatically spin down
 > (standby) when there is nothing to do.
 > It's working properly, I only have one problem: backuppc writes to the
 > per-pc log file in $topdir/pc/$host/LOG.**** every times it wakes up and
 > tries to ping (or nmblookup) that host.
 > It does nothing but writing one line in the log file that it couldn't reach
 > the host.
 >
 > As I'm trying to save energy and protect my hard drives from too many spin
 > downs/spin ups, I want to prevent these unnecessary spin ups. I already
 > moved the general log file to a different hard drive, but there is no
 > option to move the per-pc log file (or I haven't found it).

Are you really concerned about O(24) spin-ups per day? I wouldn't
think that a once an hour spin-up would add much to the wear-and-tear
on your drive. And if you are worried about energy, just decrease the
time to spin-down to say 1 minute. That will save more than 98% of the
spin energy... Plus if you have multiple machines to back up you are
probably spreading the backup load across much of the day anyway...

No, I'm not concerned about 24 spin-ups a day, but if the spin-down time is set to let's say 20 minutes, I know it's not going to spin up more than 72 times a day. 

All that being said, preventing the logging still likely won't prevent
the hourly wake-up spin-up (at least in the absence of caching) since
at each wake up, BackupPC looks at the pc tree to determine aging of
backups... And reading spins up the disks as much as writing...


I didn't think BackupPC looks at the pc tree (e.g. it can tell me how old the last backup is without spinning up the disks) but I guess that makes it impossible to prevent the spin-up. I set it to a 5-minute spin-down (and therefore losing the safety that my disks cannot spin down more than 3 times per hour) as you suggested. That looks like the best solution to me now..

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