Re: [BackupPC-users] Migrating to bigger storage - real world experience.

[Yves T. <yve...@re...>]

Hi,
In a similar situation, we use afio. It is like cpio but much more=20
efficient.

Yves

John Pettitt wrote:

> Notes on migrating to bigger storage.
>
> Two weeks ago I asked about migrating to my BackupPC pool to bigger=20
> storage. I got a number of responses and after some experimentation=20
> reached the following conclusions:
>
> Suggestions:
>
> 1) dd the filesystem then expand it on the new storage. It's fast with =

> a good network you can max disk. Copying on the same machine I was bus =

> limited at ~40MB/sec. This is probably the best approach *if* you can=20
> expand your filesystems. However it turns out that growfs on FreeBSD=20
> is less than reliable with very large filesystems (in my case it=20
> refused to grow a 600GB filesystem to 1TB exiting with an error about=20
> seeking to a negative block number) Your experience may vary depending =

> on OS but you are strongly advised to test it first.
>
> 2) cp, pax, tar, rsync et al. All of the file copy programs have=20
> severe limitations when dealing with BackupPC pools. The initial copy=20
> file by file is slow (~ 1/3 to 1/4 of the dd copy speed) but the=20
> subsequent creation of the hard linked backup trees for each client is =

> painfuly slow. I aborted my copy after three days with less than 25%=20
> of the files linked.
>
> 3) Dump/restore =96 this has the potential to work well *if* you have a=
=20
> lot of memory in the machine =96 the restore process on my machine ran =

> out of memory (I only have 1GB in the box)
>
> 4) Don=92t bother. This is the approach I finally chose =96 I decided t=
o=20
> just create a new server and let it start backing up hosts and at the=20
> same time turn off the old server but keep that data until I have a=20
> cycle with at least two full backups for each host. A hybrid approach=20
> using this and pax/cp/tar should also be possible copying only the=20
> pool. Turning off the nightly cleanup jobs and running a full backup=20
> to create new backup tress linked to the pool then once that has run=20
> re-enabling nightly clean up.
>
> Other data points =96 The Box is an old slow Celeron 2.93 Ghz box with =

> 1GB ram and a highpoint raid card with 6 WD250 IDE drives running=20
> FreeBSD 6.2. BackupPC version is 3.0beta3. Backup pool is ~ 300GB and=20
> contains uses 9 million inodes. File systems are ufs2 with=20
> soft-updates enabled.
>
> John
>
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