Looking for Hardware Recommendations

[Eric Shubert]

Mark Phillips wrote:
> Eric,
>  
> Thanks for your auggestions. I am guessing that I do need the speed. I 
> originally had the backups running to internal IDE drives on a P3 500 
> MHz and there was not enough time at night to do all the backups. By 
> that I mean some backups had to be rescheduled. Now, I do not profess to 
> be a backuppc expert, and I have since read that using blowfish with ssh 
> will speed that up, and I may have had the backuppc maintenance running 
> at the same time as the  backups, which will slow it down. So, I have 
> two more options to speed things up in the configuration of the softbware.

Do you know where specifically the bottleneck is? It does little good to 
speed things up elsewhere. ;)

> I have 6 LAN machines, and three remote machines on the Internet. I use 
> backuppc with rsync over ssh. One of the LAN and one of the remote 
> machines are servers with medium size databases, so they take time to 
> snapshot (OODB, not msyql).

If you had trouble getting them done with internal IDE drives, then 
you'd need to find some performance improvements elsewhere before USB 
would be workable.

My guess is that the databases are what's using the lions share of 
resources. Are you doing the snapshot locally, then rsync'ing the 
snapshot file? If so then rsync isn't buying you much of anything, as it 
will need to transmit the entire snapshot each time. Just a guess.

The remote machines are going to take longer than the local ones of 
course. A USB2 drive (160Mb/sec | 20MB/sec) is plenty fast enough to 
keep up with most internet connections though.

Do the math. How many GB are you backing up daily?

> Instead of making this project a large research project to time 
> everything and figure out what I need exactly (I am not being paid for 
> this work!), I decided to spend a few more bucks on the eSata stuff 
> since it is as fast as I can go within a reasonable budget, and then 
> tweak the backuppc configs as needed if I run out of bandwidth. Not very 
> scientific, but somewhat practical and a little more expensive.

Sounds like a practical approach. Time is money after all. And eSATA is 
15x faster than USB2. :)

> As always, I am open to differing opinions and new ideas, so don't worry 
> about offending me if you think I am totally missing the mark! (no pun 
> intended).
>  
> Mark
> 
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 3:46 PM, Eric Shubert <ejs at shubes.net 
> <mailto:ejs at shubes.net>> wrote:
> 
>     Mark Phillips wrote:
>      > I need to set up a backup drive(s) for several home machines. I
>     want to
>      > use external Sata drives. My older P4 machine has a PCI 2.2 bus, so I
>      > need a recommendation for a Sata drive controller card for one or two
>      > external Sata 2 drives. The card has to work with Debian and
>     backuppc.
>      > Also, a recommendation for 1 TB+ eSata drives.
>      >
>      > Thanks!
>      >
>      > Mark
>      >
> 
>     Do you really need the speed for backups? You might consider using USB2
>     instead of eSATA. I have external backup drives configured mirrored
>     (with software raid-1) on USB2. It works nicely. It's not as fast as
>     eSATA would be, but it's adequate.
> 
>     --
>     -Eric 'shubes'
> 
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-- 
-Eric 'shubes'