Thomas Taylor wrote:
I would like to set up an older desktop system for backing up five home systems over the internal LAN. This would probably be a scheduled weekly job involving both Linux and Windows boxes.
What hardware other than the computer, LAN card, and LARGE (2+ TB-wife has LOTS of photos) disk would be needed?
---- If you are going to backup "alot", I'd suggest upgrading your internal lan to 1Gbit if you are not there already. I wouldn't bother trying to use NFS on windows.. Cygwin/rsync is "ok", but even w/gbit, don't expect more than about 5-10MB/s. Knock that down to <1-3MB/s if you use anytype of compression. A problem w/rsync is that you will have to tweak the options a fair amount to backup groups, and win-permission lists. If you want to be able to do full restores, you'll find it easiest to use Windows Backup (or NT-backup for full backups on WinXP). Windows achieves 60-70MB/s doing or restoring a backup over a 1Gb net with good disks. If you just want to copy over files, which is likely for more frequent backups of data disks (maybe do image backup w/winbackup -- but would need samba setup for that ), but say you wanted to copy over the target machines "home" (/Users) directory(ies). I think you will find it faster to simply tar up files or copy them with the Win disks mounted on linux. It will usually be faster than trying to push the data on Win to a samba server, after you add in disk i/. *IF* you work hard and tune samba (I have yet to install Samba 4, so I don't know what the perf numbers are using it), I could regularly get 125MB writes and 119MB reads as reported by 'dd' (reports SI units). If you want to do compression, and if you have the room, and time, you might do the uncompressed backup so it will finish in some reasonable time, then run a compress job of choice on linux. For large archives, I think rzip will give you the most bang for the buck, BUT for large files, it can still take 1 or more days (which is why I don't bother compressing anymore). Even w/lowest settings on gzip, my backup speed was slowed to <5MB/s (latencies is a killer...and today's machines aren't fast enough compress much faster than that. Encryption schemes will slow that down more (for backups, you don't want to *have* to use encryption -- i.e. backup computer on "internal, non-routable (192.168.0-255.0-255, for example), but that could require 2 network cards (1Gb cards can be had for <$20 (or they used to)). I try to use dual intf. cards on most of my computers. One way to "stay ahead" in the backup game... is to lower the need for it. I keep all my data on a "server" (an actual dell server these days -- up from my old dual-socket P-III workstation solution after it died after almost 10 years in service). It depends on the applications and speed requirements, but I keep my Documents and Media (basically all my "content") on the linux box where I can run direct backups on it. Overall .. if you aren't looking to restore a dead system from a backup but just save copies of personal files, the running of tar on cifs mount of the remote hard disks is likely the way to go. You'll have to be sure to give 'Admin' full access to all the files you want to backup. You could try multiple backup methods and go w/what works best in your environment -- more work, but better result long term. post back if you have Q's..... Linda -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org