[GTALUG] On the subject of backups.

[John Sellens]

On Mon, 2020/05/04 12:03:19PM -0400, Alvin Starr <alvin at netvel.net> wrote:
| The client really only wants to use Centos/RHEL and ZFS is not part of that
| mix at the moment.

Well, one could argue that zfs on centos is fairly well supported ...


| The data is actually sitting on a replicated Gluster cluster so trying to
| replace that with an HA NAS would start to get expensive if it were a
| commercial product.

Of course "expensive" depends on the client.  An HA truenas that size,
all flash is (I believe likely well) under $15K USD.


Ah - you didn't mention Gluster.

In theory, Gluster has geographic replication.

And if your bricks are on LVM storage, you can use gluster snapshots as well:
    https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/Administrator%20Guide/Managing%20Snapshots/
to guard against accidental removals, etc.

(I've not used either, and my glusters are quite old versions at the present time.)

Depending on how it's all configured, you may get better performance
backing up the bricks, rather than backing up gluster itself.  I have
a two-node gluster, mirrored, so I can backup the bricks on one of the
servers and get everything.  Obviously that's a very simple "cluster".

Traditionally, gluster filesystem performance with large numbers of
small files in a directory is horrible/pathetic.  If you're backing up
the gluster filesystem, you would almost certainly get better performance
if your file structure is deeper and narrower, if that's possible.

Cheers

John