Richard Elling wrote: > David Dyer-Bennet wrote: >> >> I'm interested in the same question. I'm looking at what to use for >> backup from my Solaris file server. I've had rather bad experiences >> with external Firewire and USB disks, especially in performance >> (can't be absolutely sure the problem isn't with Windows there, >> though, or even the specific backup software). So I'm wondering if >> using the eSATA port to connect to an external enclosure with >> multiple drives in it might be a winning strategy. Two external >> enclosures, alternate monthly for a full backup, say. I'm tempted to >> use ZFS on a random selection of disks with no redundancy, as a way >> to keep costs down. This does of course multiply the chance of a >> drive going bad and invalidating a big chunk of the backup just when >> it hurts most. >> > > If you care enough to do backups, at least care enough to be > able to restore. For my home backups, I use portable drives with > copies=2 or 3 and compression enabled. I don't fool with > incrementals, but many people do. The failure mode I'm worried > about is decay, as the drives will be off most of the time. The > copies feature works well for this failure mode. >
I am definitely and strongly interested in restoring! That's why I hate my previous backup solutions so much (NTI backup and then Acronis True Image); I verified backups and tested restores, and had *FAR* too much trouble to be at all comfortable. The photos and the ebooks are backed up eventually (but not always within the month) to good DVDs, and one copy is kept off-site, and that's the stuff I'd miss most if it went, but I want a good *overall* solution. The "copies" thing sounds familiar from discussion here...ah. Yes, that's exactly perfect; it lets me make up a batch of miscellaneous spare disks totaling enough space, each one a vdev, put them into one pool (no redundancy), but with copies=2 get nearly the redundancy of mirroring which would have required matching drives. At least, if I find a solution for connecting that bunch of disks conveniently. I really want one box with easily swappable disks, and one cable. (And then two of them, since of course I need two sets of backup media to alternate between.) And I could update the old full backup to become the new one using rsync locally, perhaps much faster than doing a full CP. So how do I get introduced to SAS, and how does that relate to SATA, and where does "infiniband" come in (I know of that one only in terms of huge expensive switches, does it actually apply to home disk setups at all?)? I'm going to start with Wikipedia tonight, and then see what people suggest for further information. -- David Dyer-Bennet, [EMAIL PROTECTED]; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
