[ale] Bacula backup gathering?

[DJ-Pfulio]

> I wonder how much RAM/CPU would be required for this?  I wonder if I could
> use a low-power ARM board?

ARM has an I/O limitation which makes it a poor choice for almost any disk or
network I/O.  You can use a Pentium G3258 (MB+CPU around $100) and have an
amazing NAS box, however. 35W typical power use.  Have 6 drives in mine now and
it does lots of other things as a plex media server. It transcodes 1080 MPEG2 to
h.264 (for a R.pi) nicely while not impacting storage access for other systems
at all. There are low-power options from Intel, but those will cost $100+ more.
I haven't looked at the AMD > 20W stuff in a few years.  It can be very
attractive for $70-ish. A4/A6 APUs, interesting.  When AMD changed from Athlon
naming, they completely lost me. I can't look at an AMD CPU name and have any
clue about performance or power use these days.  Had an AMD/E350 box that used
only 20W with 2 spinning disks, but the storage ports were highly limited and it
was only USB2. Had GigE, so that was nice. The small case prevented most add-on
cards, etc.  PicoPSU made it almost silent - couldn't hear standing next to it -
it was in a corner working 24/7/365 for years as a XBMC/Kodi box with a remote,
until the GPU couldn't keep up with HiDef content.  Oddly, a Raspberry Pi v2
does that job now. Arm has enough I/O for streaming and playback, but not enough
for much more.  USB2 storage and 100base-tx are pretty limiting.  2 yrs ago, the
J1900 was the answer for this stuff. Seems pricey for what it can do compared to
a G3258.

Good idea. Just don't think ARM is the way, yet. Or are there ARM devices that
can do the 200Mbps+ I/O and GigE?  Some of the Marvell CPU devices have been
used for storage for years, but they seemed to be just at the limit for the I/O
that those devices could handle.


>> I thought that most enterprise tape drives had HW encryption built in?
> 
> I'm not using tape, myself, so this is mostly irrelevant.

To you. And to me too. ;)  The convenience of a few 4TB HDDs for backups more
than outweighs the added cost-per-GB. The 4T Hitachi prices have been bouncing
all over the place - $139 or $185 in 1 week! Crazy. I missed a $139 deal last
week. Boo on me. :(

>> We're all looking for "the best" backup tool for our personal values of
>> "the
>> best." The search continues?
> 
> Yep.  It does.