> On 11/04/10 10:08, Oliver Hoffmann wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I'll do backups to disk on a raid6 (28 TB) which is attached via
> > fibre channel.
> > 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? 
> > 
> > Should I do one big volume pool or better a few smaller ones?
> > I think one big pool is easier to manage.
> 
> I have a total of four pools:  a Full pool on tape and a Full pool on
> disk, both with one-year retention; a Differential pool on disk, with
> two months retention (thus spanning across two monthly Full backups);
> and an Incremental pool on disk with one week retention (sufficient to
> span from one weeky differential backup to the next).

Ah, ok. I think I'll start simply with one pool and add more later on
depending on my needs.

> > What is the best size for the volumes? 
> > 100 GB seems to be reasonable. 
> 
> I do not limit my volume sizes.  I manage their size using volume use
> duration instead.  Each days backups go into a single volume, whatever
> size that volume needs to be, a few GB or several hundred.

Interesting approach. 

> > Which file system to have the best transfer rates? xfs? ext4?
> > 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.
> > 
> > What do you think?
> 
> If your backup server will be running Linux, then for the time being I
> would suggest XFS.  It is optimized for sustained streaming reads and
> writes, with multimedia and video originally in mind, but just the
> thing for Bacula volumes.  You might want to consider btrfs when it
> becomes production-ready, though.
> 
> My backup server runs Solaris 10 x86, and backs up to ZFS.
> 

I will use xfs. I read about optimisations concerning both raid and
streaming. Looks like the fs of choice for bacula + raid. 
btrfs might be an option for the next backup server in a couple of
years. I consider it as not production-ready yet.
zfs is fine. I had an zfs-only FreeBSD system with attached
usb-drives with raidz. But with a hardware raid it is quite obsolete.

Cheers,

Oliver




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