Hi All apologies for my basic questions here. I’ve read through the manual but it does not really cover this.
I work for a non-profit and I have a network of around 10 servers, 8 windows 2 linux. We are absolutely draconian here and merciless when it comes to user files, and have repeatedly told users “if you save anything to the C drive your not guaranteed to have it - use the network server shares for your data” All users know that if anything at all goes wrong with their PC then in 30 minutes we will have swapped their PC with a replacement that is freshly imaged and anything on their old PC is in the bit bucket. And we routinely do this and some of the holdouts HAVE lost significant data and complained up their chain about it only to be told variations of “that’s what you get”
You might think users hate our guts but users are users and once they get used to doing it our way and not their way, they don’t really care that they don’t get “their drive on their PC” anymore. Many in fact come to see the light and actually like it this way since they can login to any PC in the enterprise and all their files are right there in their H drive. We like it too since we aren’t forking over a mil a year to Citrix for “virtual desktops” or other hair-brained slow and unworkable “cloud PC” schemes.
So now, thankfully, we don’t have to worry about backing up a zillion client PCs like leaves in the tree, we just have to worry about backing up the fileservers.
I have a backup server that consists of a Proliant dl20 gen 9, with 3 USB attached 8TB disks in external docks. I’ve been using a ‘different’ ™ backup software for this under Windows Server 2019 but for a variety of reasons that’s no longer usable so I decided to give UrBackup a go.
I installed Ubuntu Server 26 on the machine, formatted the 3 disks EX4 and created one big directory with this line in /etc/fstab:
/mnt/disk1:/mnt/disk2:/mnt/disk3 /mnt/urbackup fuse.mergerfs defaults,allow_other,use_ino,cache.files=off,category.create=mfs,minfreespace=20G,fsname=mergerfs 0 0
When I added the first Windows server to UrBackup it immediately triggered a file backup that ran at around 3-5Mbts/sec overnight. (it was only around 150GB) after that completed it then immediately triggered an image backup that ran at around 550Mbt/sec which took about an hour.
So my questions are the following:
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Normally I’ve been getting around 500Mbt/sec with the ‘other’ software doing a file backup. That software did a sort of all-in-one backup where you could either do a bare metal image restore or individual file restore. Why is the UrBackup file backup so slow compared to the image backup and what can I do to fix this? Normally with the ‘other’ software I’ve always run with compression shut off in order to get max speed is that my problem is UrBackup compression the problem? I noticed in the default settings this is turned on, as well as encryption, and I don’t need that either. Should I use a different filesystem on the target disks?
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For some of my servers I don’t really need a filebackup but an image backup once a week would be really helpful, while with others an image backup would be useless while a file backup would be really helpful.
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My largest fileserver to backup is a Windows 2019 server with 1.5 million files on it. This is the one that a file backup would be most helpful.
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Is there any way to stop the client from immediately triggering a backup when the urBackup client is first loaded on it?
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I run 3 sets of target disk drives every couple weeks I swap the set and delete the now-stale backups from the oldest physical drives and use those as the new target. With the ‘other’ backup software I never run incrementals it’s always full backups. Having air-gapped backups is important, as well as having no dependency on a NAS. And having backups atomic (not dependent on each other) is also very important as I can’t have one failed incremental trashing an entire set.
If I do a systemctl stop urbackupsrv, then unmount my target disks, swap them, reformat them, then remount everything again, and then systemctl start urbackupsrv, is UrBackup going to throw fits when it suddenly sees /mnt/urbackup blanked out? Or is there a better way to do this? Keep in mind that I routinely lose around 1 of the 8TB target drives every year or two. These are Western Digital 7200 rpm 3.5TB black drives. I don’t do long term archiving of files (we have a different cloud backup system for that) the purpose of the UrBackup system is in case of a fire or flood to be able to quickly restore servers as I can’t wait around for a month for a cloud backup solution to download a million files to a restored server over an internet connection.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions! It’s extremely rare we ever use this backup system it’s for DR use not daily “I accidentally deleted a file off the server” use, but when we do need it - we really need it.