What distro is everyone using to run UrBackup Server? I have it on Ubuntu right now for testing but am about to upgrade the hardware and rebuild the server. Now would be a good time to pick the permanent distro to run it on. I’ve been thinking about OpenIndiana or something similar but just wanted to see what the rest of the community is using.
Also - BTRFS or ZFS?
The snapshotting backup via btrfs is currently best, because you get block deduplication basically for free and file backups are really fast. You could use Ubuntu for that. You need at least the btrfs in kernel 3.6. It’s very cutting edge, so there might be problems at some point.
Otherwise this does of course depend on what you want, what server hardware you have (raid, ssd caching, …) and the amount of clients you’ll have.
Thanks for the info.
The hardware consists of:
2x Xeon x5550 (Quad Core)
24 Gb RAM
2 x 250GB drives for OS
8 x 3TB 7200RPM for data pool (btrfs or zfs)
I’d be backing up roughly 30 - 40 clients. Most under 100 Gb of DATA with the exception of one file server that is 3TB. I’ve got a dual core test box that I’ve been playing with and the file server seemed to have backed up fine. The initial full took 2.5 days but incrementals haven’t been too bad. I don’t have an SSD caching capable card but I haven’t read up enough on btrfs to know if I can just throw a SSD in the box and have it use that for pool caching.
BTW - Doesn’t btrfs only support RAID 0/1/10? I see that RAID 5/6 support was just merged into the code but I can’t imagine how unstable that will be until it gets some time in use.
Well you could combine it with the standard Linux software raid or use a hardware raid, I guess. You’ll have some disadvantages such as long rebuild times. You won’t need a caching device if you don’t use something like ZFS deduplication. It is backup storage and you don’t need good random access speed such as for databases.
Another thing you can look at is using temporary file buffers. Create a striped, fast volume. Set TMPDIR onto that volume and enable the temporary file buffers in “Advanced” in UrBackup. UrBackup will then copy files there first and create the backups on the backup storage in parallel. This is especially advantegous for btrfs, because there UrBackup can store only changed blocks of files (thats what I meant with free deduplication). If only a few blocks of say a Outlook pst file change, only those few blocks are written to backup storage (the rest to tmp storage before that).