I think about how the implementation and benefit of UrBackup could get improved.
UrBackup also runs on various Linux distributions and as far as I know there are some storage appliances basing on Linux such as FreeNAS, that Support deduplication of stored data. So combining these two things, one could get much more benefit out of UrBackup: saving around 5 to 8 TB of client data on one 3 or 4 TB disk.
Implementation on Linux Systems seems not to be as simple as it is in Windows (as far as I read in this Forum, myself I do now have any Linux based UrBackup Installation and I never tried). But do not some of these storage appliances support Plug-Ins?
What about bringing these two tings together by porting UrBackup so such one linux based NAS appliance plugin? Admins would have an eysier life implementing UrBackup, the implemented system would be able to store much more data (with deduplication activated) as a simple server and UrBackup user community would grow faster.
What do you all think about that in general?
It doesn´t have to be FreeNAS - any other suggestions appreciated. I have no expierience in such systems because we use NetApps. What possible destintion portings would you prefer and why?
If you do a lot of image backups you’d probably want a operating system with ZFS support. I.e. Solaris, FreeBSD (or Debian kFreeBSD) or Linux (zfsonlinux).
Linux generally has the best hardware support (drivers).
I could not find a zfs disk management web interface for Linux. Zfsonlinux is considered stable and ready for production, though.
If you have file backups with clients with lots of files and/or big files with small changes btrfs perfoms better than zfs with deduplication (through UrBackup trickery), with the deduplication factor not that much worse. I wouln’t consider btrfs stable, though. Btrfs-RAID is very new, so you’d need to combine that with the Linux-RAID support or Hardware RAID. Did not find any web interface for that either. Maybe there is a Plugin for webmin. Open Media Vault is getting btrfs support http://wiki.openmediavault.org/index.php?title=Roadmap .
OK I didn´t know that there already is a tutorial how to install it on FreeNAS. But this is still a bit tricky for People aware of installing FreeNAS but not aware of compiling and so on. A real Plug-In I guess one qould only have to download and put in as is.
I may be late for this but I think, this would be good if we have support for few common image formats so that it can run on any filesystem and not limiting ourself to storage that are not scalable.
They are better managed and gives better performance and reliability in case of storage issue or disaster instead on counting on on single storage box.
For example - I am using scale-out storage based on Moosefs and these are very stable and provides good performance when scaled. They have atomic snapshot feature which can also be used.
I would suggest to look at Moosefs, for more information, its better than btrfs in terms of performance and reliability.
But if we have a image format more common or without limitation then we can use any underlying filesystem for urbackup and it would do great.
I have seen some have requested for vhdx format but that too have limitation of 64TB which is still good compared to 2TB on vhd.
The devloper can decide which should go right may be vhdx, raw or any other, Though this is just my suggestion.
However .raw format will work with most of the hypervisors and gives added advantage to other developers to automate things at hypervisor level too in case of disaster.