gdreade
Dabbler
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2015
- Messages
- 34
I've got bags of experience in UNIX (various flavours) and storage systems, but am just starting to evaluate FreeNAS.
I've got a situation where a remote site requires lots of storage relative to the bandwidth of it's network connectivity. To put things in perspective, I'm looking at maintaining 30-50TB of data (plus space for snapshots) that is generated in a very bursty manner, sometimes generating many TB per day. The FreeNAS server would be primarily be providing NFS/AFP services. (Lots of sequential reads and writes.)
When it comes to offsite backups, network-based backup/replication is a non-starter due to the amount of data involved and the rate of churn. Therefore I'm looking at a form of sneakernet where storage unit sizes are much smaller than the size of the zpool. Reading the forums, it sounds like the main option here would be connecting an external disk via eSATA, writing part of a backup to the external disk, exchanging it for the next disk, and repeat until the backup is done. And the external disk would have to be formatted with zfs (as a single disk vdev?)
I see that a Bacula SD plugin is available, so I guess that's an option (letting Bacula split the backup across multiple media, although I'm a bit surprised that there's no Bacula FD plugin), as is resurrecting some old scripts that used to be for backing up larger disks up to smaller tapes, via tar(1), split(1), and assorted goodness. (A simple rsync isn't going to cut it because the FreeNAS zpool size is greater than the size of the external disk.)
Am I missing any offsite backup options here?
I've got a situation where a remote site requires lots of storage relative to the bandwidth of it's network connectivity. To put things in perspective, I'm looking at maintaining 30-50TB of data (plus space for snapshots) that is generated in a very bursty manner, sometimes generating many TB per day. The FreeNAS server would be primarily be providing NFS/AFP services. (Lots of sequential reads and writes.)
When it comes to offsite backups, network-based backup/replication is a non-starter due to the amount of data involved and the rate of churn. Therefore I'm looking at a form of sneakernet where storage unit sizes are much smaller than the size of the zpool. Reading the forums, it sounds like the main option here would be connecting an external disk via eSATA, writing part of a backup to the external disk, exchanging it for the next disk, and repeat until the backup is done. And the external disk would have to be formatted with zfs (as a single disk vdev?)
I see that a Bacula SD plugin is available, so I guess that's an option (letting Bacula split the backup across multiple media, although I'm a bit surprised that there's no Bacula FD plugin), as is resurrecting some old scripts that used to be for backing up larger disks up to smaller tapes, via tar(1), split(1), and assorted goodness. (A simple rsync isn't going to cut it because the FreeNAS zpool size is greater than the size of the external disk.)
Am I missing any offsite backup options here?
