From: <tm...@ob...> - 2009-01-11 02:27:49
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"Tim Chipman" <tch...@gm...> wrote on 01/10/2009 08:35:57 PM: > Context: Small office site (daycare) with 4 windows workstations, > approx 50gigs of data to backup in total across all machines, and slow > incremental growth expected on disk footprint over next 3-5 years. OK. > Intent: I have a generic whitebox PC P3-933 with 512mb ram, into which > I'll put a PCI sata card, and then attach 2 x 1 Tb Seagate Sata > drives. On top of this, install CentOS 5.2/32bit and then do software > raid-1 mirror on the 2 volumes, so I expect to have ~900gigs of usable > space for the backupPC slice. The disk is "over capacity" because > they want to have room for this server for a ~5 year lifespan, and > given current disk prices, it makes little sense to get anything > smaller than 1 Tb drives, I think. I would agree. > The LAN connecting these systems is vanilla 100mb ether, although > upgrade to gig-ether is possible - but I'm not sure it really is > merited. Obvious would put a gig-ether nic the backupPC box if this > was to happen. 100Mb is fine. > Backup plan, would be to do monthly full and nightly incrementals, or > something like that. Possibly 2 concurrent sessions, although with so > few clients it really doesn't matter much I think. There's really no reason not to do weekly fulls. The amount of data is so small, it won't hurt *anything*. > So - the basic question: Should I expect BackupPC to run smoothly on > hardware of this vintage ? Certainly. > Will it suffer too much from a low-power > CPU ? Would it run significantly smoother on something less ancient (I > might be able to get a P4-2ghz system for this role, for example). Assuming no compression, it will do *just* fine. I never use compression on my backups, and given your 1TB capacity, why would you? My standard BackupPC server is a 1.5GHz Via EPIA EN (which is *easily* slower than a ~1GHz PIII), 512MB RAM, and a single PATA or SATA hard drive. Don't let others tell you you need more RAM: I've got servers with more than half a million files and I use exactly zero swap with 512MB RAM. Nor will you need more CPU: I usually have 30% or more in "waiting", meaning that I am *not* CPU bound. I've got backup servers that back up multiple servers that total more than 500GB of data between them (200GB, 250GB and a few other servers in the 20GB range). I've also got other servers that back up servers that only have 50GB of data, but have daily incremental backups of 50GB (*plus* backing up other servers, too!). All of them work fine with the above hardware. Tim Massey |