[ale] Use opensuse 13.1 to build NAS machine

Scott Plante splante at insightsys.com
Wed Dec 31 12:50:43 EST 2014


JD wrote: 
> You shouldn't care about any directories under the top level for the `hostname` 
> backup. Versioning needs to be part of the backup tool used, not something you 
> maintain manually except in extreme situations. 


I agree you wouldn't want to just create copies for each day and certainly letting the backup tool handle it is a great alternative--it's basically what we're doing now. I've been wondering about switching over letting the backup tool just copy the files and letting the filesystem handle the versioning though. You've been able to do this for a while with LVM snapshots, and now directly with BTRFS snapshots. One problem is you can't use one big tar file or other compressed backup file, but you can set BTRFS to use compression. 


I set up a Buffalo NAS device for a small office, and it seemed to me that's what they were doing under the covers. They then mounted each snapshot under a date directory that you could then access--so if you were looking for the old copy of some document you'd messed up, you could just sit at your PC and look in your backup mount and look for it directly without opening some backup software or getting an admin involved. It worked pretty well for them because a great many of their files didn't change very often. 


Buffalo was doing some housekeeping under the covers and I don't know if they were using BTRFS, LVM, ZFS, or what exactly, but it doesn't seem like too much scripting work on top of the snapshot facility provided by the filesystem. Besides generating the snapshots, you'd have to check for disk space and come up with a scheme for deleting old snapshots. Have you ever tried such a setup? If so, any gotchas you can think of, or reasons to use the versioning in the backup tool instead? 


Scott 
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