[GTALUG] On the subject of backups.

[Nicholas Krause]

On 5/5/20 11:27 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Mon, May 04, 2020 at 10:42:25PM -0400, Alvin Starr via talk wrote:
>> The files are generally a few hundred KB each. They may run into a few MB
>> but that's about it.
>> I use to use ReiserFS back in the days of ext2/3 but it kind of fell out of
>> favor after the lead developer got sent away for murder.
>> Reiser was much faster and more reliable than ext at the time.
>> It would actually be interesting to see if running a reiserfs or btrfs
>> filesystem would actually make a significant difference but in the long run
>> I am kind of stuck with Centos/RH supported file systems and reiser and
>> btrfs are not part of that mix anymore.
> ReiserFS was not reliable.  I certainly stopped using it long before
> the developer issues happened.  The silent file content loss was just
> unacceptable.  And it wasn't a rare occurance.  I saw it on many systems
> many times.  ext2 and 3 you could at least trust with your data even if
> they were quite a bit slower.  Certainly these days RHEL supports ext2/3/4
> and XFS (their default and preferred).  I use ext4 because it works well.
> GlusterFS defaults to XFS and while technically it can use other
> filesystems (and many people do run ext4 on it apparently) I don't
> believe they support that setup.
>
>> I am not sure how much I can get by tweaking the filesystem.
>> I would need to get a 50x -100x improvement to make backups complete in a
>> few hours.
>> Most stuff I have read comparing various filesystems and performance are
>> talking about percentage differences that is much less than 100%.
>>
>> I have a feeling that the only answer will be something like Veeam where
>> only changed blocks are backed up.
>> A directory tree walk just takes too long.
> Well, does the system have enough ram?  That is something that often
> isn't hard to increase.  XFS has certainly in the past been known to
> require a fair bit of ram to manage well.
I mentioned to check /proc/meminfo as well to look at cache in case you
missed that.

Nick
>

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