Store file and image backup separately

Feature requests
1

There were a few posts on this topic but I still post a new one for a solution that fits my needs.

I’m hosting the urbackup server on an old laptop running Arch with a 1TB 7200r HDD and recently installed a 280GB SSD in the DVD drive bay. The laptop is placed in my bedroom and running 7*24. The server is configured to do a file backup every 15mins, and a image backup per 3 days. The size of a full image backup is around 200GB.

I’m try to reduce the need to spin up the HDD for longer lifespan and reduce noise and heat by moving whole system to SSD, but the images created by urbackup couldn’t fit in. In this situation I have to keep the whole backup folder in HDD, and the drive will spin up every 15min for file backup. If urbackup could write file and image backups in different path, the spin up for HDD could be reduced to around 1 time per 3 days? Another related questions is do urbackup need to access image backup for compression during file backup?

All I want to do is to store only those big image backups directly into HDD to reduce the spin up time. Is there an alt way to achieve this?

2

I did some homework and here are my new finds.

  1. ZFS might be a alternative solution. There are threads on fine-tuning ZFS mixed with SSD and HDD to reduce HDD disk activity.
  2. Keep it spinning might be better for HDD lifespan? I need to avoid spinning it up every 15mins for a file backup. The disk is currently spinning 7*24 for all system logs are written into it.
3

This seems like a specific use case situation and although technically not a difficult fix would need a fair bit of backup code re-write, i wouldn’t hope on seeing this any time soon, especially with encryption in the pipeline and other features requested. Most install on a server which is running 24/7.

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