[GTALUG] Backups with Bacula

[Giles Orr]

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 15:52, Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 04:21:41PM -0400, Christopher Browne via talk
> wrote:
> > Bacula has always seemed to be one of the good options out there, and
> > running it on FreeNAS is certainly well supported.
> >
> > There's nothing obviously wrong with your approach to rsync to a
> > remote place or copy to external HDD for rotation.
> >
> > Madison Kelly did a talk on something akin back in 2004; Madison was
> > the first person I heard that particularly "championed" using
> > USB-connected HDDs as a backup medium at the time that tape drives
> > were only just starting to get supplanted as a backup medium.
> >
> > Since then, that direction has become somewhere in between "viable"
> > and "preferable."  And it now looks like tape drives are pretty rarely
> > used anymore, as rarity has made it difficult for vendors to boost
> > capacity as quickly as is the case for disk drives.  *Everyone* wants
> > bigger HDDs.  (Well, we're starting to glimpse a place where solid
> > state drives are getting sufficiently large and cheap that a lot of
> > computer systems now prefer SSD, and we may see HDDs go somewhat down
> > the road that tape drives have...)
> >
> > Rotating the HDDs so that they do get spun up fairly regularly is a good
> idea.
>
> My experience some years ago with 3 USB harddrives that were rotated
> weekly was that the disks didn't last long.  3.5" HDs do not like
> being moved a lot and frequently died.  Moving to tape was way way
> more reliable but certainly had a higher cost in terms of getting a
> tape drive and for recovery you might need another tape drive while a
> USB drive works with anything.
>
> If your backup is pretty small though, USB attached SSD seems like it
> could be a very reliable solution.
>

I used to use a rotating set of 2TB 2.5" external USB hard drives.  None of
them ever failed on me over about three years use, although three out of
four they were generally only accessed every week or two.  I've now
switched to three 4TB 2.5" drives: the heavily used one of those is now
stuttering (confirming my pre-existing bias against Seagate ... the
previous set were WD).  The 2.5" spinning drives are somewhat more
expensive than the 3.5", but they're much smaller - and, important in this
use case, more built for movement and frequent spin-up/spin-down.

And I have to disagree with Anthony on this one: spinning disks are going
to be in use for a while as external backups: sure, they're slow, but this
is a BACKUP.  Cost per terabyte is immensely lower and speed isn't usually
the priority, and you can put multiple copies of backups (or diffs, or
whatever suits you) on one large external.

-- 
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com
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