> > I'll do backups to disk on a raid6 (28 TB) which is attached via
> > fibre channel.
> 
> I recommend against using a single raid for backups. If the raid
> controller silently corrupts your raid or there is a file system
> problem you can easily loose all of your backups. I have seen both
> happen in my 15 years in the industry. I was not in-charge of the data
> when either happened and we were not using bacula.

Well, then I'd need two raids or the like. So, that's the old matter of
how much effort (aka money) do I put in redundancy. Besides I'll attach
a tape later on for full backups every two or three weeks.

> > There will be 50 clients with data ranging from a few MB to 100 GB
> > or more for a full backup, tiny files from mail servers as well as
> > large database ones.
> > Speed and reliability are both important (as always).
> >
> > The question now is simply what is the best setup?
> >
> 
> I do not think there is one simple best setup.

Sure, but one that fits my needs ;-)

> >
> > Should I do one big volume pool or better a few smaller ones?
> > I think one big pool is easier to manage.
> >
> This is a user preference. I have 15 to 20 pools with about the same
> amount of space and clients but most of these pools are for archival.
> I only have 2 pools for backup.
> 
> >
> > What is the best size for the volumes?
> 
> My opinion is 5 to 10 GB. But others use much larger volumes. Since
> you have so much space 100GB would be fine. Remember that recycling is
> all or none. I mean an entire volume needs to be recycled to reclaim
> any space from after a job expires. So if you make your volumes too
> large the recycling may take longer than you think.

I had volumes with 20 GB on slow USB-drives, which was ok concerning
recycling. 
As long as the RAID is quite fast I do not expect problems with 100 GB
volumes.

> > 100 GB seems to be reasonable.
> >
> > Which file system to have the best transfer rates? xfs? ext4?
> 
> Either xfs or ext4 are good choices. On the subject of filesystems I
> do not believe ext3 is a good choice however since it will take
> minutes to delete a large file like this with xfs and ext4 taking less
> than 1 second.

Yep, ext3 is out of question. Advantages so far for xfs: mkfs takes a
fraction of a second, just 4.9 MB taken after formating and no problem
with all of the 28 TB. ext4 has a restriction of 16 TiB due to
e2fsprogs.

> > xfs could be better here but I am not sure about it.
> >
> > I like ubuntu. 10.04.1 LTS or the newer 10.10?
> > I tend to LTS.
> >
> I would go for the newer.

Because later is greater? And after a while I simply do a dist-upgrade
with a (small) risk of messing all up?

> John
> 
thx,

Oliver


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