Re: [BackupPC-users] Best FS for BackupPC

[Adam G. <mai...@we...>]

On 24/05/2011 11:25 PM, Michael Stowe wrote:
> I did a relatively short filesystem comparison when I moved my BackupPC
> pool to another set of drives.  The high level results:
>
> jfs, xfs:  quick, stable
> reiserfs:  not stable
> ext4:      slow
> ext3:      very slow
>
> The "not stable" designation comes from power-off-during-write tests. 
> Other filesystems generally handled this gracefully, but reiserfs
> corrupted the entire tree, and the recovery tools didn't get it back
> intact.

Just a couple of my own personal comments on reiserfs:
1) It does usually handle random power-offs on both general servers and
backuppc based servers.
2) It does sometimes have problems resurrecting the filesystem when it
has been corrupted, I did lose *one* home directory out of 400 once upon
a time.... (about 9 years ago...)
3) I've used reiserfs on both file servers and backuppc servers for
quite a long time (and also desktops until very recently) with no
problems that I wouldn't expect from any other FS. One backuppc server I
used it with never expired any backup, and did daily backups of about 5
servers with a total of 700G data. This was working fine for over 5
years (turned off recently due to company issues, not technical).

I would expect that any FS will *sometimes* have a problem fixing it's
FS after a power loss unless you use journally on the data as well as
the FS info. Perhaps in your testing you either didn't enable the
correct journalling options, or found that particular corner case.
Perhaps next time it happens jfs/xfs might hit their corner cases.

My understanding of reiserfs development is that it is stable, and being
in the linux tree, is maintained.

However, while I liked reiserfs a lot, I've recently found that support
for it is declining (can't even select it as a FS option when installing
some new OS's), and that other FS's offer a lot of the same performance
features, thus making reiserfs somewhat obsolete. It would be nice to
see some real performance benchmarks with reiserfs and jfx/xfs but I
can't really be bothered, and probably neither is anyone else. I expect
reiserfs will eventually go away, and as such I'm migrating away from it
as my systems are retired/etc (but it will be in use for a long time as
it isn't easy to format and restore or migrate large amounts of data...)

I don't mean to disparage xfs/jfs or any testing anybody has done, just
wanted to share my personal experiences.

Regards,
Adam
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I'm doing some benchmarks with BackupPC and I wanted to ask
>> here about the filesystems you are using and why.
>>
>> Which one do you think is best for BackupPC?
>>
>> I saw on the documentation that some users found Reiser is better than
>> ext3:
>>
>> [docu]
>> "Several users have reported significantly better performance using
>> reiserfs compared to ext3 for the BackupPC data file system"
>> [/docu]
>>
>> But I doubt to use ReiserFS as it is no longer being developed or
>> updated and I do not know if it's a FS mature enough for production.