[Discuss] On-site backups revisited - rsnapshot vs. CrashPlan

[Rich Pieri]

On Thu, 21 Feb 2013 13:20:05 -0800
"Rich Braun" <richb at pioneer.ci.net> wrote:

> It's a lot more than zero seconds to rebuild a big file server;
> converting 8TB of data from any fs to any other fs is a lot more than
> a few hours.

So is generating checksums for 8TB worth of existing data and stuffing
them in a database. But that's all happening in the background so I
don't count it as actual work time.

Converting ext2/3 to Btrfs can be done in place with three commands:
umount, fsck, btrfs-convert.

In terms of actual work performed up front by the guy at the keyboard,
your database method takes 3+ hours of work while using Btrfs takes
less than 5 minutes.

> Alas, the O/S distro that I'm currently using precludes
> the zero-effort solution that you recommend: btrfs has only been
> supported in very-recent O/S distros.

RHEL v6 and Debian 6 have Btrfs kernel modules and userspace tools.
These are hardly "very-recent" distros.

-- 
Rich P.