Hi,

I just wanted to share my experience as I wanted to place my
/var/lib/BackupPC on a new device.

Before it was placed on a drbd device (RAID1 through network). It worked
pretty fine, no issues at all. The secondary node was located in a
different building but it was a old server which consumed a lot of
power. So I was looking for a solution with less power consumption.

Additionally I had around 500GB free space on the device so I wanted to
shrink it to save disk space.

My idea was to buy a NAS device which offers iSCSI LUNs to my backuppc
server would see this LUN as local device and use it as second disk in a
RAID1 (mdadm). as I had to move the data away from drbd device I planned
to copy them file by file. Knowing it would take a while as my pool is
about 1.4GB in (compressed) size! Anyways. I transferred the pool/
directory with rsync and then used the BackupPC_tarPCCopy to create the
hard links. This took AGES! All together around 12days!

Unfortunately the NAS device I got (Netgear ReadyNAS 104) didn't work
well with Linux (CentOS6) iSCSI implementation....so I had to re-think.
Now it uses a image file on NFS with loop device. I don't care about
performance...

I didn't want my BackupPC to be down for another week so I decided to do
an image copy. The issue was with the reduced device- so I had to shrink
the filesystem first. And to fsck the filesystem first. And then dd the
device...I though this would take ages. In the end the fsck and den
resize2fs took only 3 hours all together. And the dd seems to be done
within 36hrs.

So if anyone is planning to change his /var/lib/BackupPC to another
device- do not use rsync, BackupPC_tarPCCopy or file based utilities.
You'll be waiting AGES! fsck, resize2fs and dd works like a charm and
ways faster!

So now I have my BackupPC server running on a SW-RAID1 (mdadm) which
uses a image located remotely.
Just wanted to share if anyone is interested.


Greetings

Christian


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