Best practice for backups and greyhole

bellamatt
Posts: 57
Joined: Wed Jan 05, 2011 5:38 am

Best practice for backups and greyhole

Postby bellamatt » Sun May 03, 2015 8:35 pm

I'm thinking of reconfiguring my server to make better use of my available drive space, and am wondering how other people are using Greyhole, particularly whether you have included an external drive in your storage pool.

My HDA looks like this:

In the box:
2 x 2TB storage drives - in a Greyhole storage pool
1 x 64GB SSD for OS - not in the pool. Separate partitions for /, /boot and swap
External:
1 x 4TB external hard drive - not in the pool, used only for backups

I run Crashplan for backups, and save them to a /mnt/samba/backups share which is linked to the external drive. That drive also has an rsync copy of some directories that I created a couple of years ago and forgot about. It stopped syncing long ago, which is good as I just now realised this directory has some files that I thought were lost forever. Hooray!

Anyway I'm thinking of switching this so that the external hard drive is part of the storage pool, and using Greyhole to back up with Crashplan as a contingency for irreplaceable files (ie photos and home videos), and for cloud backup. For reference the hard disk writes at about the same speed as the internal drives, actually slightly faster according to a quick speed test:

Code: Select all

[matt@localhost drive3]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1048576 count=2048 2048+0 records in 2048+0 records out 2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 15.1235 s, 142 MB/s [matt@localhost drive1]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1048576 count=2048 2048+0 records in 2048+0 records out 2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 18.2587 s, 118 MB/s
The plan is to set storage up as follows:
Shares holding super-important files: Greyhole +1 copy, Crashplan. This setup ensures that there are 2 redundancies plus cloud as reserve.
Shares holding important files that would be a hassle to replace: Greyhole +1. One redundancy for when a drive fails.
Shares holding easily replaced files: Greyhole. To be honest I have the space to do Greyhole +1 for everything, might just do this as a failsafe.

An alternative is to scrap local Crashplan backups, and use Greyhole +2 copies so I can be sure that the extra files are on separate disks. I would still use Crashplan for remote backup, and to locally store backups from other computers. The benefit of Crashplan is that it will host local versions of deleted files, so it's a better protection against foolishness! Decisions...

I'm interested in other people's experience. Has anyone else used Greyhole with an external drive?

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